Author: Hilary MacMillan

Hilary MacMillanHilary serves as EVP for Engineering at CyLogic. She’s spent more than 20 years in systems engineering; enterprise and solutions architecting; cybersecurity; modeling and simulation; enterprise modernization; product deployment; engineering process development; market analysis and growth strategy development; and business planning and development.  She holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in Systems Engineering from George Mason University.

 

From the Winter 2024 Issue

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QKD versus PQC: A Quantum Showdown? Part 2

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

QKD versus RQC

This is part two of a two-part article on secure key distribution in a post-quantum world.  Part one focused on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) as a method to securely distribute encryption keys.  This article will focus on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC), which seeks new quantum-resistant (i.e., hypothesized, but can’t be proven, to be secure against) cryptographic … Read more

From the Winter 2024 Issue

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QKD versus PQC: A Quantum Showdown? Part 1

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

HilaryMacMilan-feature-wn19

The need for communications confidentiality has existed since humans developed language. Accounts of the Greco-Persian wars in fifth century B.C. described steganography, (hiding the existence of a message). Cryptography, on the other hand, hides a message’s meaning. The cryptographic task of encryption enables a sender to “scramble” a message’s content, rendering it unreadable to anyone … Read more

From the Fall 2023 Issue

How Well Are Your Files protected?

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

How well are your files protected?

Files are among a company’s most valuable assets and their presence has a very real impact on a company’s viability, to its bottom line, its reputation or legal standing, and its ability to operate and deliver products or services. Consider your company’s files for a moment.  What’s in them?  Financial data?  Confidential plans or product … Read more

From the Winter 2020 Issue

Threat Modeling: Methodologies, Myths, and Missing Perspectives

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

Threat Modeling

On April 10, 2014, citizens of Ghaziabad, a city near Delhi, India, cast their ballots for parliamentary elections using electronic voting machines. The machines – and the votes they held – had to be stored in a secure location for a month, until vote counting was set to begin.  When planning, election officials accounted for … Read more

From the Summer 2018 Issue

It’s Time for Digital Health and Hygiene

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

digital-hygiene-header

Physical health and hygiene education in primary and secondary schools is taken as a given now, but it wasn’t always so. It was not until 1840 that Rhode Island legislation made health education mandatory.1 The 1850 publication by school teacher Lemuel Shattuck, of the Report of a General Plan for the Promotion of Public and … Read more

From the Spring 2018 Issue

Shifting Left: Secure Systems Engineering

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

macmillan-feature-image

The Shift Left principle1 is well known in software and systems development, particularly in relation to testing. It’s the idea of performing test activities earlier in the system development life cycle – developing test cases and procedures and performing incremental testing as code is being written. Ideally, test activities start even earlier than this, designing … Read more

From the Winter 2018 Issue

Trustworthy IoT: Just Another Block in the Chain

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

Trustworthy IOT header image

Ah, the Internet.  It’s impossible to imagine life without it.  The ability to connect and interact has fundamentally changed and continues to change society.  We can exchange information and assets around the world nearly instantaneously.  We can see and examine physical objects and environments from afar.  We can exert control and monitor actions from opposite … Read more

From the Fall 2017 Issue

WHAT THE HASH? Data Integrity and Authenticity in American Jurisprudence

Author(s):

Hilary MacMillan, EVP for Engineering, CyLogic

Legal battles over compulsory data decryption are making headlines. The publicity will likely continue as encryption technology proliferates in both consumer and enterprise markets. The arguments on both sides of this issue merit careful consideration and discourse before any comprehensive policy decision is made or legal precedent is set. One side argues that alternate decryption … Read more