Rick Kuhn
Affiliate Faculty
Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRick Kuhn is a distinguished computer scientist and IEEE Fellow with a multi-decade career at NIST and current affiliate faculty roles at Virginia Tech, known for co-developing role-based access control—the dominant model for access control today. His research focuses on combinatorial methods for automated testing and autonomous systems assurance, driving the NIST ACTS project and influencing practical cybersecurity testing standards. Author of three books and over 200 publications, he blends deep theoretical work with technology transfer that has earned multiple federal and professional awards, including IEEE lifetime achievement and innovation honors. With an MS in computer science and an MBA, he uniquely bridges technical rigor and organizational impact, often translating combinatorial theory into deployable testing tools and standards. Less obvious is his sustained record of collaborative, award-winning papers that continue to shape both academic thinking and operational practices in software verification.
10 years of coding experience
41 years of employment as a software developer
MS Computer Science, MS Computer Science at University of MarylandMBA, MBA at William & Mary
Github Skills (16)
nist8
capability8
testing7
attestation7
ccpa6
integrity6
matrix5
privacy-enhancing-technologies5
data-structure5
pii5
blockchain4
gdpr4
erasure4
privacy3
cybersecurity3
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (3)
usnistgov/combinatorial-testing-tools
Mar 2016 - Sep 2019
Tools for combinatorial testing developed by the NIST ACTS project
Contributions:30 commits, 1 PR, 18 pushes in 3 years 6 months
combinatorialcombinatorial-testingnisttesting
usnistgov/blockmatrix
Jun 2018 - Sep 2018
This project is developing code to implement features and extensions to the NIST Cybersecurity Whitepaper, "A Data Structure for Integrity Protection with Erasure Capability". The block matrix data structure may have utility for incorporation into applications requiring integrity protection that currently use permissioned blockchains. This capability could for example be useful in meeting privacy requirements such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires that organizations make it possible to delete all information related to a particular individual, at that person's request.
Contributions:5 commits, 2 pushes, 1 branch in 3 months
developingparticulareuropeanintegrityerasure
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