Charles E. Munson

Dr. Charles E. Munson IV is a technical staff member in the Cyber Operations and Analysis Technology Group with a focus on cybersecurity in the cloud, edge, and Internet of Things, as well as technology transitions to the commercial sector. Munson is particularly passionate about bringing easy-to-use, low-overhead security to the government and consumer space, especially while contributing to the open-source community. 

While working at Lincoln Laboratory, Munson has helped to develop and transition the Keylime key bootstrapping and integrity management software architecture to the open-source Cloud Native Computing Foundation community with the support of Red Hat.  Keylime is designed to help bring a hardware-based root of trust to the cloud, following the zero-trust “never trust, always verify” mantra.  This technology is distributed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which will allow Keylime to help protect millions of cloud and enterprise environments worldwide. IBM has also deployed Keylime to protect their IBM Cloud fleet and perform remote attestation for their thousands of servers. 

Munson is also providing guidance to determine the cybersecurity and resiliency needs to help modernize and protect the next-generation Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.  ALIS is the logistics backbone of the F-35 aircraft, helping to aggregate the functionality of training, maintenance, supply chain management, mission planning, and transmission of mission data into a single convenient entity.   

 Munson earned his MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.  His masters’ research was focused on cryptography and quantum-based true random number generation.  During his PhD program, he helped coordinate a multilaboratory effort aimed at modeling, designing, fabricating and experimentally testing long-lifespan, semiconductor-based betavoltaic batteries. Munson also won first prize in his startup pitch for using these batteries to enable long-lifespan pacemakers at the 2016 French Trophée MC6 competition.