trust – Alice, Eve and Bob

What’s your website’s D&D alignment?

This is the impression – often the first impression – that users of the website get of the organisation.

Cookies and Dungeons and Dragons – a hypothesis

Recent privacy legislation has led organisations to have to adopt ways of allowing their users to register their cookie preference in ways which expose the underlying motivations of the org. I have a related theory, and it goes like this: these different registration options allow you to map organisations to one of the 9 Dungeons and Dragons character alignments.

This may seem like a bit of a leap, but stick with me. First, here’s a a little bit of background for those readers who’ve never dabbled in (or got addicted to -there’s little room between the two extremes) the world of Dungeons and Dragons (or “D&D”). There are two axes used to describe a character: Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic and Good-Neutral-Evil. Each character has a position across each of these axes, so you could have someone who’s Lawful-Good, one who’s Chaotic Neutral or one who’s Neutral-Good, for instance (a “Neutral-Neutral” character is described as “True Neutral”). A Lawful character follows the law – or a strong moral code, whereas a Chaotic one just can’t be bothered. A Neutral character tends to do so when it suits them. The Good-Neutral-Evil axis should be pretty clear.

Second bit of background: I never just accept cookies on a website. I always go through the preferences registration options, and almost always remove permissions for all cookie tracking beyond the “minimum required for functionality”. I know I’m in a tiny minority in this, but I like to pretend that I can safeguard at least some of my private data, so I do it anyway (and so should you). I’ve noticed, over the past few months, that there are a variety of ways that cookie choices are presented to you, and I reckon that we can map several of these to these D&D alignments, giving us a chance to get a glimpse into the underlying motivation of the organisation whose website we’re visiting.

I’ve attempted to map the basic approaches I’ve seen into this table.

Lawful Good	Neutral Good	Chaotic Good
Functional cookies only by default.	No cookies, and a link to a long and confusing explanation about how the organisation doesn’t believe in them.	No cookies at all, no explanation.
Lawful Neutral	True Neutral	Chaotic Neutral
Functional and tracking cookies by default, clear what tracking cookies are; all easy to turn off.	Functional and tracking cookies by default, completely unclear what the cookies do.	Random selection of cookies, and it’s unclear what they do, but you can at least turn them off.
Lawful Evil	Neutral Evil	Chaotic Evil
All cookies by default: functional, tracking and legitimate uses. Easy to remove with “reject all” or “object all”.	All cookies by default. “Legitimate uses” need to be deselected individually.	All cookies by default, with 100s listed. You have to deselect them by hand (there’s no “reject all” or “object all”), and there’s a 2 to 5 minute process to complete the registration, which finishes on 100% but never completes.

D&D alignments and website cookie preference approaches

Clearly, this is a tongue-in-cheek post, but there’s an important point here, I think: even if this glimpse isn’t a true representation of the organisation, it’s the impression – often the first impression – that users of the website get. My view of an organisation is formed partly through my interaction with its website, and while design, layout and content are all important, of course, the view that is presented about how much (if at all) the organisation cares about my experience, my data and my privacy should be something that organisations really care about. If they don’t respect me, then why should I respect them?

If I’m trying to attract someone to work for me, partner with me or buy from me, then my marketing department should be aware of the impression that visitors to my website glean from all interactions. At the moment, this seems to be missing, and while it’s not difficult to address, it seems to have escaped the notice of most organisations up to this point.

Enarx hits 750 stars

Yesterday, Enarx, the open source security project of which I’m co-founder and for which Profian is custodian, gained its 750th GitHub star. This is an outstanding achievement, and I’m very proud of everyone involved. Particular plaudits to Nathaniel McCallum, my co-founder for Enarx and Profian, Nick Vidal, the community manager for Enarx, everyone who’s been involved in committing code, design, tests and documentation for the project, and everyone who manages the running of the project and its infrastructure. We’ve been lucky enough to be joined by a number of stellar interns along the way, who have also contributed enormously to the project.

Enarx has also been supported by a number of organisations and companies, and it’s worth listing as many of them as I can think of:

Profian, the current custodian
Red Hat, under whose auspices the initial development began
the Confidential Computing Consortium, a Linux Foundation Project, which owns the project
Equinix, who have donated computing resources
PhoenixNAP, who have donated computing resources
Rocket.Chat, who have donated chat resources
Intel, who have worked with us along the way and donated various resources
AMD, who have worked with us along the way and donated various resources
Outreachy, with whom worked to get some of our fine interns

When it all comes down to it, however, it’s the community that makes the project. We strive to create a friendly, open community, and we want more and more people to get involved. To that end, we’ll soon be announcing some new ways to get involved with trying and using Enarx, in association with Profian. Keep an eye out, and keep visiting and giving us stars!

What is attestation for Confidential Computing?

Without attestation, you’re not really doing Confidential Computing.

This post – or the title of this post – has been sitting in my “draft” pile for about two years. I don’t know how this happened, because I’ve been writing about Confidential Computing for three years or so years by now, and attestation is arguably the most important part of the entire subject.

I know I’ve mentioned attestation in passing multiple times, but this article is devoted entirely to it. If you’re interested in Confidential Computing, then you must be interested in attestation, because, without it, you’re not doing Confidential Computing right. Specifically, without attestation, any assurances you may think you have about Confidential Computing are worthless.

Let’s remind ourselves what Confidential Computing is: it’s the protection of applications and data in use by a hardware-based TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). The key benefit that this brings you is isolation from the host running your workload: you can run applications in the public cloud, on premises or in the Edge, and have cryptographic assurances that no one with access to the host system – hypervisor access, kernel access, admin access, even standard hardware access[1] – can tamper with your application. This, specifically, is Type 3 – workload from host – isolation (see my article Isolationism – not a 4 letter word (in the cloud) for more details), and is provided by TEEs such as AMD’s SEV and Intel’s SGX – though not, crucially, by AWS Nitro, which does not provide Confidential Computing capabilities as defined by the Confidential Computing Consortium.

Without attestation, you’re not really doing Confidential Computing. Let’s consider a scenario where you want to deploy an application using Confidential Computing on a public cloud. You ask your CSP (Cloud Service Provider) to deploy it. The CSP does so. Great – your application is now protected: or is it? Well, you have no way to tell, because your CSP could just have taken your application, deployed it in the normal way, and told you that it had deployed it using a TEE. What you need is to take advantage of a capability that TEE chips provide called an attestation measurement to check that a TEE instance was actually launched and that your application was deployed into it. You (or your application) asks the TEE-enabled chip to perform a cryptographically signed measurement of the TEE set-up (which is basically a set of encrypted memory pages). It does so, and that measurement can then be checked to ensure that it has been correctly set up: there’s a way to judge whether you’re actually doing Confidential Computing.

So, who does that checking? Doing a proper cryptographic check of an attestation measurement – the attestation itself – is surprisingly[2] tricky, and, unless you’re an expert in TEEs and Confidential Computing (and one of the points of Confidential Computing is to make is easy for anyone to use these capabilities), then you probably don’t want to be doing it.

Who can perform the validation? Well, one option might be for the validation to be done on the host machine that’s running the TEE. But wait a moment – that makes no sense! You’re trying to isolate yourself from that machine and anyone who has access to it: that’s the whole point of Confidential Computing. You need a remote attestation service – a service running on a different machine which can be trusted to validate the attestation and either halt execution if it fails, or let you know so that you can halt execution.

So who can run that remote attestation service? The obvious – obvious but very, very wrong – answer is the CSP who’s running your workload. Obvious because, well, they presumably run Confidential Computing workloads for lots of people, but wrong because your CSP is part of your threat model. What does this mean? Well, we talked before about “trying to isolate yourself from that machine and anyone who has access to it”, the anyone who has access to it is exactly your CSP. If the reason to be using Confidential Computing is to be able to put workloads in the public cloud even when you can’t fully trust your CSP (for regulatory reasons, for auditing reasons, or just because you need higher levels of assurance than existing cloud computing), then you can’t trust your CSP to provide the remote attestation service. To be entirely clear: if you allow your CSP to do your attestation, you lose the benefits of Confidential Computing.

Attestation – remote attestation – is vital, but if we can’t trust the host or the CSP to do it, what are your options? Well, either you need to do the attestation yourself (which I already noted is surprisingly difficult), or you’re going to need to find a third party to do that. I’ll be discussing the options for this in a future article – keep an eye out.

1 – the TEEs used for Confidential Computing don’t aim to protect against long-term access to the CPU by a skilled malicious actor – but this isn’t a use case that’s relevant to most users.

2 – actually, not that surprising if you’ve done much work with cryptography, cryptographic libraries, system-level programming or interacted with any silicon vendor documentation.

My book at RSA Conference NA

Attend RSA and get 20% off my book!

Attend RSA and get 20% off my book!

I’m immensely proud (as you can probably tell from the photo) to be able to say that my book in available in the book store at the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week. You’ll find the store in Moscone South, up the escalators on the Esplanade.

If you ever needed a reason to attend RSA, this is clearly the one, particularly with the 20% discount. If anyone’s interested in getting a copy signed, please contact me via LinkedIn – I currently expect to be around till Friday morning. It would be great to meet you.

Enarx 0.3.0 (Chittorgarh Fort)

Write some applications and run them in an Enarx Keep.

I usually post on a Tuesday, but this week I wanted to wait for a significant event: the release Enarx v0.3.0, codenamed “Chittorgarh Fort”. This happened after I’d gone to bed, so I don’t feel too bad about failing to post on time. I announced Enarx nearly three years ago, in the article Announcing Enarx on the 7th May 2019. and it’s admittedly taken us a long time to get to where we are now. That’s largely because we wanted to do it right, and building up a community, creating a start-up and hiring folks with the appropriate skills is difficult. The design has evolved over time, but the core principles and core architecture are the same as when we announced the project.

You can find more information about v0.3.0 at the release page, but I thought I’d give a few details here and also briefly add to what’s on the Enarx blog about the release.

What’s Enarx?

Enarx is a deployment framework for running applications within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). We provide a WebAssembly runtime and – this is new functionality that we’ve started adding in this release – attestation so that you can be sure that your application is protected within a TEE instance.

What’s new in v0.3.0?

A fair amount of the development for this release has been in functionality which won’t be visible to most users, including a major rewrite of the TEE/host interface component that we call sallyport. You will, however, notice that TLS support has been added to network connections from applications within the Keep. This is transparent to the application, so “Where does the certificate come from?” I hear you ask. The answer to that is from the attestation service that’s also part of this release. We’ll be talking more about that in further releases and articles, but key to the approach we’re taking is that interactions with the service (we call it the “Steward”) is pretty much transparent to users and applications.

How can I get involved?

What can you do to get involved? Well, visit the Enarx website, look at the code and docs over at our github repositories (please star the project!), get involved in the chat. The very best thing you can do, having looked around, is to write some applications and run them in an Enarx Keep. And then tell us about your experience. If it worked first time, then wow! We’re still very much in development, but we want to amass a list of applications that are known to work within Enarx, so tell us about it. If it doesn’t work, then please also tell us about it, and have a look at our issues page to see if you’re the first person to run across this problem. If you’re not, then please add your experiences to an existing issue, but if you are, then create a new one.

Enarx isn’t production ready, but it’s absolutely ready for initial investigations (as shown by our interns, who created a set of demos for v0.2.0, curated and aided by our community manager Nick Vidal).

Why Chittorgarh Fort?

It’s worth having a look at the Wikipedia entry for the fort: it’s really something! We decided, when we started creating official releases, that we wanted to go with the fortification theme that Enarx has adopted (that’s why you deploy applications to Enarx Keeps – a keep is the safest part of a castle). We started with Alamo, then went to Balmoral Castle, and then to Chittorgarh Fort (we’re trying to go with alphabetically sequential examples as far as we can!). I suggested Chittorgarh Fort to reflect the global nature of our community, which happens to include a number of contributors from India.

Who was involved?

I liked the fact that the Enarx blog post mentioned the names of some (most?) of those involved, so I thought I’d copy the list of github account names from there, with sincere thanks:

@MikeCamel @npmccallum @haraldh @connorkuehl @lkatalin @mbestavros @wgwoods @axelsimon @ueno @ziyi-yan @ambaxter @squidboylan @blazebissar @michiboo @matt-ross16 @jyotsna-penumaka @steveeJ @greyspectrum @rvolosatovs @lilienbm @CyberEpsilon @kubkon @nickvidal @uudiin @zeenix @sagiegurari @platten @greyspectrum @bstrie @jarkkojs @definitelynobody @Deepansharora27 @mayankkumar2 @moksh-pathak

Rahultalreja11 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Emotional about open source

Enarx is available to all, usable by all.

Around October 2019, Nathaniel McCallum and I founded the Enarx project. Well, we’d actually started it before then, but it’s around then that the main GitHub repo starts showing up, when I look at available info. In the middle of 2021, we secured funding a for a start-up (now named Profian), and since then we’ve established a team of engineers to work on the project, which is itself part of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Enarx is completely open source, and that’s really central to the project. We want (and need) the community to get involved, try it out, improve it, and use it. And, of course, if it’s not open source, you can’t trust it, and that’s really important for security.

The journey has been hard at times, and there were times when we nearly gave up on the funding, but neither Nathaniel nor I could see ourselves working on anything else – we really, truly believe that there’s something truly special going on, and we want to bring it to the world. I’m glad (and relieved) that we persevered. Why? Because last week, on Thursday, was the day that this came true for me. The occasion was OC3, a conference in Confidential Computing organised by Edgeless Systems. I was giving a talk on Understanding trust relationships for Confidential Computing, which I was looking forward to, but Nick Vidal, Community Manager for the Enarx project, also had a session earlier on. His session was entitled From zero to hero: making Confidential Computing accessible, and wasn’t really his at all: it was taken up almost entirely by interns in the project, with a brief introduction and summing up by Nick.In his introduction, Nick explained that he’d be showing several videos recorded by the interns of demos they had recorded. These demos took the Enarx project and ran applications that the (they interns) had created within Keeps, using the WebAssembly runtime provided within Enarx. The interns and their demos were:

TCP Echo Server (Moksh Pathak & Deepanshu Arora) – Mosksh and Deepanshu showed two demos: a ROT13 server which accepts connections, reads text from them and returns the input, ROT13ed; and a simple echo server.
Fibonacci number generator (Jennifer Chukwu) – a simple Fibonacci number generator running in a Keep
Machine learning with decision tree algorithm on Diabetes data set (Jennifer Kumar & Ajay Kumar) – implementation of Machine Learning, operating on a small dataset.
Zero Knowledge Proof using Bulletproof (Shraddha Inamdar) – implementation of a Zero Knowledge Proof with verification.

What is exciting about these demos is several-fold:

three of them have direct real-world equivalent use cases:
1. The ROT13 server, while simple, could be the basis for an encryption/decryptions service.
2. the Machine Learning service is directly relevant to organisations who wish to run ML workloads in the Cloud, but need assurances that the data is confidentiality and integrity protected.
3. the Zero Knowledge Proof demo provides an example of a primitive required for complex transaction services.
none of the creators of the demos knew anything about Confidential Computing until a few months ago.
none of the creators knew much – if anything – about WebAssembly before coming to the project.
none of the creators is a software engineering professional (yet!). They are all young people with an interest in the field, but little experience.

What this presentation showed me is that what we’re building with Enarx (though it’s not even finished at this point) is a framework that doesn’t require expertise to use. It’s accessible to beginners, who can easily write and deploy applications with obvious value. This is what made me emotional: Enarx is available to all, usable by all. Not just security experts. Not just Confidential Computing gurus. Everyone. We always wanted to build something that would simplify access to Confidential Computing, and that’s what we, the community, have brought to the world.

I’m really passionate about this, and I’d love to encourage you to become passionate about it, too. If you’d like to know more about Enarx, and hopefully even try it yourself, here are some ways to do just that;

visit our website, with documentation, examples and a guide to getting started
join our chat and then one of our stand-ups
view the code over at GitHub (and please star the project: it encourages more people to get involved!)
read the Enarx blog
watch the video of the demos.

I’d like to finish this post by thanking not only the interns who created the demos, but also Nick Vidal, for the incredible (and tireless!) work he’s put into helping the interns and into growing the community. And, of course, everyone involved in the project for their efforts in getting us to where we are (and the vision to continue to the next exciting stages: subscribe to this blog for upcoming details).

Enarx 0.2.0 – Balmoral Castle

Now it’s possible to write applications that you can talk to over the network

The big news this week from the Enarx project is our latest release: 0.2.0, which is codenamed “Balmoral Castle”, to continue with our castle/fortification theme.

The big change in Enarx 0.2.0 is the addition of support for networking. Until now, there wasn’t much you could really do in an Enarx Keep, honestly: you could run an application, but all it could to for input and output was read from stdin and write to stdout or stderr. While this was enough to prove that you could write and compile applications to WebAssembly and run them, any more complex interaction with the world outside the Keep was impossible.

So, why is this big news? Well, now it’s possible to write applications that you can talk to over the network. The canonical example which we’ve provided as part of the release is a simple “echo” server, which you start in a Keep and then listens on a port for incoming connections. You make a connection (for instance using the simple command-line utility ncat), and send it a line of text. The server accepts the connection, receives the text and sends it right back you. It can handle multiple connections and will send the text back to the right one (hopefully!).

This is new functionality with Enarx 0.2.0, and the ability to use networking mirrors an important change within WASI (the WebAssembly System Interface) specification, the runtime implemented within an Enarx Keep. Specifically, WASI snapshot preview 1, released in January (2022) now supports the the ACCEPT capability on sockets. The way that WASI works with managing permissions and capabilities is carefully designed, and we (the Profian folks working on Enarx) coordinated closely with the open source WASI/Wasm community to add this in a way which is consistent with the design philosophy of the project. Once the capability was added to the snapshot, there was one more step needed before Enarx could implement support, which was that it needed to appear in wasmtime, the WebAssembly runtime we use within Keeps to allow you to run your applications. This happened last week, in wasmtime release 0.34.0, and that allowed us to make this new release of Enarx.

This may not sound very exciting … but with this in place, you start to build proper applications and micro-services. What about an HTTP server? A ROT13 “encryption” service? A chatbot? An email server? A Wordle implementation[1]? And it’s not just text that you can send over a network connection, of course. What might write to process other types of data? A timestamp server? A logging service? With a network connection, you have the ability to write any of these. Micro-services are all about accepting connections, processing the data that’s come in, and then sending out the results. All of that is possible with this new release.

What we’d love you to do is to start writing applications (using networking) and running them in Enarx. Tell us what works – even better, tell us what doesn’t by creating an issue in our github repository . Please publish examples, join our chat channels, give us a github star, get involved.

What’s coming next? Well, keep an eye on the Enarx site, but be assured that I’ll announce major news here as well. You can expect work in attestation and deployment in the near future – watch this space…

1 – at time of writing, everyone’s talking about Wordle. For those of you coming from the future (say a couple of weeks from now), you can probably ignore this example.

[Image of Edward VII at Balmoral Castle from Wikimedia].

Trust book – playlist!

A playlist of music to which I’d listened and which I’d enjoyed over the months it took to write the book.

I had probably more fun than I deserved to have writing the acknowledgements section of my book, Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud (published by Wiley at the end of December 2021). There was another section which I decided to add to the book purely for fun: a playlist of music to which I’d listened and which I’d enjoyed over the months it took to write. I listen to a lot of music, and the list is very far from a complete one, but it does represent a fair cross-section of my general listening tastes. Here’s the list, with a few words about each one.

One thing that’s missing is any of the classical music that I listen to. I decided against including this, as I’d rarely choose single tracks, but adding full albums seemed to miss the point. I do listen to lots of classical music, in particular sacred choral and organ music – happy to let people have some suggestions if they’d like.

Secret Messages – ELO – I just had to have something related (or that could be considered to be related) to cryptography and security. This song isn’t, really, but it’s a good song, and I like it.
Bleed to Love Her – Fleetwood Mac – Choosing just one Fleetwood Mac song was a challenge, but I settled on this one. I particularly like the harmonics in the version recorded live at Warner Brothers Studio in Burbank.
Alone in Kyoto – Air – This is a song that I put on when I want to relax. Chiiiiilllll.
She’s So Lovely – Scouting for Girls – Canonically, this song is known as “She’s A Lovely” in our family, as that’s what we discovered our daughters singing along to when we played it in the car many years ago.
Prime – Shearwater – This is much more of an “up” song when I want to get an edge on. Shearwater have a broad range of output, but this is particular favourite.
Stay – Gabrielle Aplin – I like the way this song flips expectations on its head. A great song by a talented artist.
The Way I Feel – Keane – A song about mental health.
Come On, Dreamer – Tom Adams – Adams has an amazing voice, and this is a haunting song about hope.
Congregation – Low – I discovered this song watching DEVS on Amazon Prime (it was originally on Hulu). Low write (and perform) some astonishing songs, and it’s really worth going through their discography if you like this one.
Go! – Public Service Broadcasting – You either love this or hate it, but I’m in the “love” camp. It takes original audio from the Apollo 11 moon landing and puts it to energising, exciting music.
The Son of Flynn (From “TRON: Legacy”/Score) – Daft Punk – TRON:Legacy may not be not the best film ever released, but the soundtrack from Daft Punk is outstanding Electronica.
Lilo – The Japanese House – A song about loss? About hope? Another one to chill to (and tha band are great live, too).
Scooby Snacks – Fun Lovin’ Criminals – Warning: explicit lyrics (from the very beginning!) A ridiculous song which makes me smile every time I listen to it.
My Own Worth Enemy – Stereophonics – I slightly surprised myself by choosing this song from the Stereophonics, as I love so many of their songs, but it really does represent much of what I love about their oeuvre.
All Night – Parov Stelar – If you ever needed a song to dance to as if nobody’s watching, this is the one.
Long Tall Sally (The Thing) – Little Richard – Sometimes you need some classic Rock ‘n’ Roll in your life, and who better to provide it?
Shart Dressed Man – ZZ Top – “Black tie…” An all-time classic by men with beards. Mostly.
Dueling Banjos – Eric Weissberg – I first heard this song at university. It still calls out to me. There are some good versions out there, but original from the songtrack to Deliverance is the canonical one. And what a film.
The Starship Avalon (Main Title) – Thomas Newman – This (with some of the others above) is on a playlist I have called “Architecting”, designed to get me in the zone. Another great film.
A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke – A song of sadness, pain and hope.
This Place – Jamie Webster – A song about Liverpool, and a family favourite. Listen and enjoy (the accent and the song!).

If you’d like to listen to these tracks yourself, I’ve made playlists on my two preferred audio streaming sites: I hope you enjoy.

Spotify – Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud – Bursell

Qobuz – Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud – Bursell

As always, I love to get feedback from readers – do let me know what you think, or suggest other tracks or artists I or other readers might appreciate.

“Trust in Computer Systems and the Cloud” published

I’ll probably have a glass or two of something tonight.

It’s official: my book is now published and available in the US! What’s more, my author copies have arrived, so I’ve actually got physical copies that I can hold in my hand.

You can buy the book at Wiley’s site here, and pre-order with Amazon (the US site lists is as “currently unavailable”, and the UK site lists is as available from 22nd Feb, 2022. ,though hopefully it’ll be a little earlier than that). Other bookstores are also stocking it.

I’m over the moon: it’s been a long slog, and I’d like to acknowledge not only those I mentioned in last week’s post (Who gets acknowledged?), but everybody else. Particularly, at this point, everyone at Wiley, calling out specifically Jim Minatel, my commissioning editor. I’m currently basking in the glow of something completed before getting back to my actual job, as CEO of Profian. I’ll probably have a glass or two of something tonight. In the meantime, here’s a quote from Bruce Schneier to get you thinking about reading the book.

Trust is a complex and important concept in network security. Bursell neatly unpacks it in this detailed and readable book.
Bruce Schneier, author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

At least you know what to buy your techy friends for Christmas!

Who gets acknowledged?

Some of the less obvious folks who get a mention in my book, and why

After last week’s post, noting that my book was likely to be delayed, it turns out that it may be available sooner than I’d thought. Those of you in the US should be able to get hold of a copy first – possibly sooner than I do. The rest of the world should have availability soon after. While you’re all waiting for your copy, however, I thought it might be fun for me to reveal a little about the acknowledgements: specifically, some of the less obvious folks who get a mention, and why they get a mention.

So, without further ado, here’s a list of some of them:

David Braben – in September 1984, not long after my 14th birthday, the game Elite came out on the BBC micro. I was hooked, playing for as long and as often as I was allowed (which wasn’t as much as I would have liked, as we had no monitor, and I had to hook the BBC up to the family TV). I first had the game on cassette, and then convinced my parents that a (5.25″) floppy drive would be a good educational investment for me, thereby giving me the ability to play the extended (and much quicker loading) version of the game. Fast forward to now, and I’m still playing the game which, though it has changed and expanded in many ways, is still recognisably the same one that came out 37 years ago. David Braben was the initial author, and still runs the company (Frontier Developments) which creates, runs and supports the game. Elite excited me, back in the 80s, with what computers could do, leading me to look into wireframes, animation and graphics.
Richard D’Silva – Richard was the “head of computers” at the school I attended from 1984-1989. He encouraged me (and many others) to learn what computers could do, all the way up to learning Pascal and Assembly language to supplement the (excellent) BASIC available BBC Bs and BBC Masters which the school had (and, latterly, some RISC machines). There was a basic network, too, an “Econet”, and this brought me to initial research into security – mainly as a few of us tried (generally unsuccessfully) to access machines and accounts were weren’t supposed to.
William Gibson – Gibson wrote Neuromancer – and then many other novels (and short stories) – in the cyberpunk genre. His vision of engagement with technology – always flawed, often leading to disaster, has yielded some of the most exciting and memorable situations and characters in scifi (Molly, we love you!).
Nick Harkaway – I met Nick Cornwell (who writes as Nick Harkaway) at the university Jiu Jitsu club, but he became a firm friend beyond that. Always a little wacky, interested maybe more about the social impacts of technology than tech for tech’s sake (more my style then), he always had lots of interesting opinions to share. When he started writing, his wackiness and thoughtfulness around how technology shapes us informed his fiction (and non-fiction). If you haven’t read The Gone-Away World, order it now (and read it after you’ve finished my book!).
Anne McCaffrey – while I’m not an enormous fan of fantasy fiction (and why do scifi and fantasy always seem to be combined in the same section in bookshops?), Anne McCaffrey’s work was a staple in my teenage years. I devoured her DragonRiders of Pern series and also enjoyed her (scifi) Talents series as that emerged. One of the defining characteristics of her books was always strong female characters – a refreshing change for a genre which, at the time, seemed dominated by male protagonists. McCaffrey also got me writing fiction – at one point, my school report in English advised that “Michael has probably written enough science fiction for now”.
Mrs Macquarrie (Jenny) – Mrs Macquarrie was my Maths teacher from around 1978-1984. She was a redoubtable Scot, known to the wider world as wife of the eminent theologian John Macquarrie, but, in the universe of the boarding school I attended, she was the strict but fair teacher who not only gave me a good underpinning in Maths, but also provided a “computer club” at the weekends (for those of us who were boarding), with her ZX Spectrum.
Sid Meier – I’ve played most of the “Sid Meier’s Civilization” (sic) series of games over the past several decades(!) from the first, released in 1991. In my university years, there would be late night sessions with a bunch of us grouped around the monitor, eating snacks and drinking whatever we could afford. These days, having a game running on a different monitor can still be rewarding when there’s a boring meeting you have to attend…
Bishop Nick – this one is a trick, and shouldn’t really appear in this section, as Bishop Nick isn’t a person, but a local brewery. They brew some great beers, however, including “Heresy” and “Divine”. Strongly recommended if you’re in the Northeast Essex/West Suffolk area.
Melissa Scott – Scott’s work probably took the place of McCaffrey’s as my reading tastes matured. Night Sky Mine, Trouble and her Friends and The Jazz provided complex and nuanced futures, again with strong female protagonists. The queer undercurrents in her books – most if not all of her books have some connection with queer themes and cultures – were for me introduction to a different viewpoint on writing and sexuality in “popular” fiction, beyond the more obvious and “worthy” literary treatments with which I was already fairly familiar.
Neal Stephenson – Nick Harkaway/Cornwell (see above) introduced me to Snowcrash when it first came out, and I managed to get a UK trade paperback copy. Stephenson’s view of a cyberpunk future, different from Gibson’s and full of linguistic and cultural craziness, hooked me, and I’ve devoured all of his work since. You can’t lose with Snowcrash, but my other favourite of his is Cryptonomicon, a book which zig-zags between present day (well, early 2000s, probably) and the Second World War, embracing cryptography, religion, computing, gold, civil engineering and start-up culture. It’s on the list of books I suggest for anyone considering getting into security because the mindset shown by a couple of the characters really nails what it’s all about.

There are more people mentioned, but these are the ones most far removed either in time from or direct relevance to the writing of the book. I’ll leave those more directly involved, or just a little more random, for you to discover as you read.

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