Prof. Fred Piper is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London and has worked in information security since 1979. In 1985, he formed a company, Codes & Ciphers Ltd, which offers consultancy advice in all aspects of information security.

Piper has acted as a consultant to over 80 companies including a number of financial institutions and major industrial companies in the UK, Europe, Asia, Australia, South Africa and the USA. The consultancy work has been varied and has included algorithm design and analysis, work on EFTPOS and ATM networks, data systems, security audits, risk analysis and the formulation of security policies. He has lectured worldwide on information security, both academically and commercially and has published more than 100 papers. He is also joint author of Cipher Systems (1982) - one of the first books to be published on the subject of protection of communications, Secure Speech Communications (1985), Digital Signatures - Security & Controls (1999) and Cryptography: A Very Short Introduction (2002).

Piper has been a member of a number of DTI advisory groups. He has also served on a number of Foresight Crime Prevention Panels and task forces concerned with fraud control, security and privacy. He is currently a member of the Scientific Council of the Smith Institute, the Board of Trustees for Bletchley Park and the Board of the Institute of Information Security Professionals. He is also a member of (ISC)²'s European Advisory Board, the steering group of the DTI's Cyber Security KTN, ISSA's advisory panel and the BCS's Information Security Forum.

In 2002, he was awarded an IMA Gold Medal for "services to mathematics" and received an honorary CISSP for "leadership in Information Security". In 2003, Piper received an honorary CISM for "globally recognised leadership" and "contribution to the Information Security Profession".