John Martin is Boeing’s Program Manager for COTS Software Security, working with Boeing’s 21,000 suppliers and partners to secure their software as a fundamental component to system hardening. His career spans the years between Blue-Box MF generators, through the era of automated hacks, and into our modern age of industrialized paranoia.  Unlike many more statesman-like contemporaries, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

The uncomfortable truth is that more than 80% of the COTS software tested by Boeing and its agents has had at least one major vulnerability that could lead to full system compromise. In 2012, Boeing began a program of zero-tolerance that would hold its COTS software suppliers to the same standards as internal software developers.