According to a report in All Things Digital, Rice will be focusing on security for the Apple iPhone and iPad. Apple has been working with Unisys to crack the US government market, which places a high priority on cybersecurity.
Rice is a 1994 graduate of the US Naval Academy and has a master’s degree in information warfare and systems engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. In addition to his NSA stint, Rice was a cryptologic officer with the US Navy.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Rice is currently consulting director for policy reform at US Cyber Consequences Unit, a nonprofit group that provides research on cyberattacks, and director at the Monterey Group, a cybersecurity consulting firm. He is also on the faculty of IANS, an information security research company. Prior to that, he was the principal risk architect at KSR/Neohapsis.
In 2007, he published a book called Geekonomics, which warned about the growing cybersecurity risk to the US software-based infrastructure. He estimated the costs of patching faulty software at $180 billion a year.
Apple has previously hired a number of high-profile cybersecurity experts. In March, it hired Window Snyder, the former security chief at Mozilla, as its senior product manager for security, and in 2009 it hired Ivan Krstic, the former head of security for the One Laptop Per Child project, to work on security for Mac OS X. Jon Callas, the former chief technology officer of encryption software maker PGP, now a unit of Symantec, joined Apple last year.