Michael Barrett is President of the FIDO Alliance, an open standards consortium that is reimagining authentication on mobile devices and the Internet. He also serves on the board of directors of StopBadWare, a 501(c)(3) Berkman Center spin out organization dedicated to mitigating the impact of malware on businesses and individuals.
From 2006 to 2013, Barrett was the Chief Information Security Officer for PayPal. In this role, he was responsible for ensuring the security of PayPal’s 130+ million accounts worldwide. He oversaw the information systems and services that protect the integrity and confidentiality of PayPal customer and employee information, and led a team of roughly 100 people.
Before joining PayPal, Barrett was Vice President of security and utility strategy at American Express, where he helped define the company’s information-security program and directed its Internet technology strategy.
Previously, Barrett was President of the Liberty Alliance, an open-standards consortium focused on identity management standards and guidelines. Barrett was the driving force behind the introduction and standardization of the Alliance’s federated identity concepts, which culminated in the development of SAML 2.0 – still by far the most widely used federated identity protocol on the Internet.
Barrett’s expertise has been recognized by policy makers and he has testified to a US congressional committee, a select committee of the UK House of Lords, an OECD inquiry into recommendations for member states, and a Highlands Forum (US DoD think tank) meeting. He has given numerous print, radio and TV interviews.
Barrett was twice named one of the 50 most powerful people in networking by Network World magazine, was named the Information Security Executive of the year in 2010 by Tech Exec Network, and recognized as one of ITSecurity.com’s 59 top influencers in the security industry. He is a certified information systems security professional (CISSP) and a certified information security manager (CISM). He graduated from Brighton University (U.K.), where he earned a bachelor of science degree in computer science.