Inside Scoop

Former VeriSign Principal Scientist, Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker Joins Comodo

Web Security Pioneer and Technical Innovator Joins Comodo

Comodo has announced a key addition to its management team with the appointment of Dr. Phillip Hallam-Baker as vice president and principal scientist to spearhead Web security and software development in Americas.

Joining Comodo from VeriSign, Dr. Hallam-Baker brings 18 years experience in Web security with the past 12 years spent as principal scientist at VeriSign. He has worked on Web security since 1992, when he worked with the world-renowned Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

While at VeriSign, Dr. Hallam-Baker served as principal scientist playing an important role in product development and training. He was a key technical contributor on numerous patents and co-inventor of protocols and was recognized for his industry leadership standards. Prior to VeriSign, he was a research scientist at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science where he had responsibility for Security and Payments issues in the newly founded World Wide Web Consortium and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he performed seminal work on securing high profile Federal Government Internet sites.

He brings to Comodo extensive knowledge of computer systems architecture at all levels from design, assembly language and high-level programming languages to platform and application architecture. Dr. Hallam-Baker earned his doctorate in nuclear physics from the University of Oxford and his bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from the University of Southampton in England.

"Watching the company as a competitor in my previous position, I recognized Comodo as the industry rising star. Since I began working on the Web at CERN in 1993, I have believed that the key to unlocking the full potential of the World Wide Web is to give people the confidence that they can use it securely. That is the vision that I knew Melih Abdulhayoglu and the executive team and engineering staff of Comodo shared which is why we were able to work together as competitors to carry Extended Validation Certificates from a hope to an industry standard. Going forward, it is clear that the challenge of securing the Internet has never been greater and never more important," Dr. Hallam-Baker said.