SoftIron Co-Founder, Mark Chen, Returns to Lead Company's Secure Provenance Strategy as CSO

LONDON, Feb. 26, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SoftIron Ltd., the leader in purpose-built and performance-optimized data center appliances, announces the appointment of Mark Chen to the role of Chief Security Officer. An original co-founder of the company, Mark previously served as the company's Chief Scientist before a professional sabbatical, and returns to lead the company's unique secure provenance strategy, aimed at reinforcing the company's security against root-level hardware and software compromises by both foreign and domestic actors.

The appointment of Chen to Chief Security Officer reinforces SoftIron's commitment to providing "clear box" solutions to customers using its superior, task-specific hardware, which currently includes storage and transcoding. Chen has been active in information security and engineering for more than twenty years, with an extensive background in cryptology, e-commerce, network security, application development, and embedded systems. He will work to enhance security in the engineering, manufacturing and auditing of SoftIron's products, which are designed, developed and assembled in California.

Chen was formerly a senior engineer and security architect for Intuit, where he designed and built the security system for the world's first online retail banking system, and was responsible for conducting scalability, performance optimization, and failure-mode analysis on the system's high-volume cryptographic servers. Chen enters the role of Chief Security Officer with a clear vision to boost SoftIron's secure provenance strategy, bringing auditable transparency to every aspect of SoftIron's hardware and software products and ensuring the integrity of critical systems and data. This mission is taking on elevated importance as governments and other organizations roll out mission-critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Edge Computing deployments and are looking for new strategies to secure supply chains for technology and communications networks. (News note: On February 10, 2020, The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) unveiled a new National Counterintelligence Strategy for the US, addressing modern-day threats, including "adversaries attempting to access national supply chains at multiple points by inserting malware into important information technology networks and communications systems.")