PNNL

Bill Nickless is a principal cyber security engineer in the National Security Directorate at PNNL. His primary research focus is the development and operation of secure, high-performance networks. This is based on his deep expertise in optical, physical, logical, cryptographic, security and network application network theory, design, implementation, tuning and operation. He is driven to deeply understand organizational mission and to build technical teams and infrastructure to support that mission. And he is passionate about advancing the science of cyber resilience, evolving current artisanal cyber security practices into a cohesive, quantitative, mathematics-based engineering discipline.

Nickless is currently the principal investigator on a network capability development project for the U.S. Department of Defense, and contributes to a number of other PNNL projects supporting various U.S. Department of Energy and other government agencies. He is co-inventor on a PNNL patent for a CPU that only executes software encrypted for that individual CPU; this technology maintains system integrity in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks—both those known today and those invented years from now.