Jon Callas

Jon Callas
Jon Callas during his stint as Entrust CTO
Residence	San Jose
Known for	Internet Security
Website	http://www.merrymeet.com/jon/

Jon Callas is an American computer security expert,software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry." Callas is credited with creating several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP, which he wrote. Prior to his work at Entrust, he was Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of PGP Corporation and the former Chief Technical Officer of Entrust.

On his website, Callas describes himself as "an entrepreneur and innovator in information and business security, including cryptography, operating system security, public key infrastructure, and intellectual property rights," as well as "an innovator in human-computer interactions, collaboration and social virtual reality."

He has also worked for Bruce Schneier's Counterpane Internet Security, was one of the primary authors of the DKIM method, and was Chief Scientist of the original PGP, Inc. founded by Phil Zimmermann. Callas is a member of the Infosec think tank The Shmoo Group.

Callas received a BSc in mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park, which he attended from 1977 to 1980. He minored in philosophy and English literature.

He was a member of the technical staff at Century Computing from 1980 to 1981, then served as principal software engineer at Digital Equipment from 1981 to 1993. While working there, he "got to work on a wide variety of things, from graphics to schedulers to memory management to operating system security," and created a random password generator. At Digital Equipment, he designed the PATHWORKS network operating system as well as software for Macintosh client systems and server systems running VMS or UNIX, and created cross-platform communications between computers running Mac OS, VMS, UNIX, Windows and OS/2, using AppleTalk, DECnet, and TCP/IP networks. He also developed software for 3D, PEX, and DDX for OpenVMS, OSF/1 and Windows NT.