Cryptography pays the piper

FRED PIPER doesn't like to talk about himself. He even sounds pleased when you tell him that it isn't all that easy to learn much about him from a Google search – he has no Wikipedia entry. He doesn't own a laptop or a mobile phone, saying he can't understand why he wouldn't want to leave his work where it belongs – at the office.

If Piper is exceptionally modest, others are a little more forthcoming with praise, particularly at the annual Infosecurity conference, where he is routinely introduced as Britan's most influential infosecurity professional.

He's deprecating about that, too. "I know how to lecture and entertain," he says, guessing that the number of former students among those polled might have something to do with the result. "Take it with a pinch of salt."

Piper started out as a cryptographer and mathematician. As such, he wrote, as he puts it, papers that "if you're lucky six people in the world could read" . These days, he says, "My brain isn't quite good enough now. I can direct research, but I can't actually do it. Like managing a football team – tell them to run."

He seems to prefer it this way. "I do very little work on my own," he says. "I just like working with people. As an academic, I'm more interested in supervising research students than doing personal research. I'd rather give a low-level lecture where everything is understood than lose everybody with some stupid mathematical problem."

He was appointed professor of mathematics at the University of London in 1975, founded an information security consultancy, Codes & Ciphers, in 1985. He's given lectures all over the place, published more than 100 papers as well as several books, served on DTI advisory groups, and won awards. The one subject that gets him talking eagerly is the work he did founding the MSc programme in information security at Royal Hollway.

"It was even before technology started taking over our lives," he says. " When people talk about me doing things they really mean the Information Security Group here doing things."

The list of his former students is impressive. Among his best-known former students is Henry Beker, who in 1988 founded the cryptography company Zergo, later known as Baltimore; Beker and Piper together wrote one of the first books on securing communications.

The programme was, he says, "quite hard to start. There was no precedent and we had no syllabus to work from. There were no academics to consult at all." It was 1992. "It was a massive battle because it needed funding, and for two years we had to work totally underresourced by the university to convince them there was a need, because there were no degrees or qualifications for information security at all. So essentially we were inventing a new academic discipline."

Lacking academic precedents, and wanting to do something "useful" and make sure students could get jobs, he consulted 23 UK and European companies and got helpful replies from 22 of them. "Nobody totally agreed," he says of the final curriculum, "but mostly we got it right."

To help convince the university, they brought in three or four industrialists to convince the administration there was a need for the course. They had to accept targets to get extra staff and, "Then you have to make the case politically."

The first year, he says, he made the conscious decision not to take too many students. "Had it gone wrong, I wanted to make sure we could do it on a one-to-one basis." The couse took only ten students, who were found through magazine advertising. After that, the number doubled every for the first few years. Piper was providing training for Zergo, and between that and being well-known in the industry from his consultancy work, word got around to all the banks.

"It was clear there was a need," he says. When the group won the Queen's Award in 1999, he says, "It was the first time as far as I am aware that the government even acknowledged security as an academic subject." µ