The Cyber Security Research Alliance

Ron Perez is a Fellow and Director of the Security Architecture organization at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Working with other senior technical leaders at AMD as well as key customers and partners in the systems and systems software areas, he is responsible for establishing and driving the Security strategy and architecture for the entire AMD product roadmap. Ron has two and a half decades of experience in the information technology industry, having impact in a broad range of areas from semiconductors to cloud computing. He has focused on systems security for over half this time as an individual contributor, technical leader, senior manager and director with outstanding research and engineering organizations.

Prior to joining AMD in 2009, Ron Perez was a Senior Manager and Senior Technical Staff Member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for twelve years, where he led the Systems Solutions and Architecture Department, multiple teams of research scientists and engineers pursuing advances in a diverse set of systems technologies including virtualization and systems management, next generation memory subsystems, stream computing, multimedia and information theory. His research interests also include systems security, with over ten years in this field and having led the Secure Systems Department at Watson, where he was responsible for the advancement of trusted computing and hardware-based virtualization technologies to achieve strong platform guarantees. Ron was also a leader of the team which achieved the world's first overall level 4 validation of a cryptographic module (secure coprocessor) under the Federal Information Processing Standards 140 (FIPS 140), the highest possible level.

Ron also represented IBM as Vice President of the Trusted Computing Group, a not-for-profit organization formed to develop, define, and promote open standards for hardware-enabled trusted computing and security technologies. Prior to joining IBM Research in 1997, he spent several years developing aspects of fault tolerant systems at Tandem Computers, and ten years with Motorola in a number of areas related to systems software and single board computers. Ron received his degree in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin.