C. Kerry Nemovicher, Ph.D.

Dr. C. Kerry Nemovicher (born September 29, 1946) is an American technologist, inventor, and cybersecurity expert. With a professional career spanning over five decades, he has worked across academia, government, and industry on topics including artificial intelligence, secure communications, and operational technology security. He is currently the CEO and President of Crytica Security, Inc., a company he co-founded. Crytica was established to bring to market its Rapid Detection & Alert (RDA) system, a cybersecurity technology he invented and designed. 

Early Life

“Dr. Kerry” (as he is known to his colleagues) was born in 1946 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His first apartment was a small, one-bedroom affair in a building long since condemned and destroyed. It had a single, pay-telephone for the entire building. 

His father, Joseph (“George”) Nemovicher, was a World War II veteran (serving as an NCO in England, France, Belgium, and Germany). After the war, George went back to school and ultimately earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at New York University (NYU) and became a highly respected therapist for the remainder of his life. 

Kerry’s mother, Rose (“Rae”) Hibshman Nemovicher, was a civilian employee of the Signal Corp during WWII. She helped determine the optimal deployment of radio equipment in armored vehicles and tanks. As her two children were growing up (Kerry and his younger sister), Rae served as the President of the Long Island chapter of the League of Women Voters, even moderating a number of televised candidate debates for regional elections. Concurrently, she earned her MS in Philosophy at NYU (studying with Professor Sidney Hook). After both her children moved out, Rae joined Grumman Aerospace. There, she rapidly rose to become the company’s first female senior executive working on the F14 fighter jet project.

Kerry’s parents played a central role throughout his life. Over time, their relationship evolved from parent and child into a deep, mutual friendship that lasted until their passing in 2017. Many of the life lessons they shared continue to guide him to this day.

Foremost among those lessons was the importance of living as a moral and ethical person. One of his father’s frequent sayings was: “In every situation in which you are involved, you must always be the ‘good guy’.” Another guiding principle was: “If it must be done, you make it fun!” No matter how difficult the task, his father believed in finding a way to make it meaningful, valuable, and even enjoyable — something Kerry remembers him mastering with ease.

His mother, too, was a powerful influence. Despite her many academic and professional achievements, she often emphasized: “The most important role a person can perform in this life is to be a good parent.” Throughout his life, Kerry has sought to live by the principles his parents instilled in him.

In the early years, while George was still in graduate school and the family faced tight financial constraints, they lived in a small apartment above Kerry’s maternal grandmother’s five-and-dime variety store in Astoria, Queens, New York. As their circumstances improved, the family moved to Roslyn, a scenic and growing suburb on Long Island. It was there, from age six through his high school graduation, that Kerry came of age.

Education and intellectual curiosity were constant themes in the Nemovicher household. Subjects like mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, and chess were always part of daily life. Music and dance — especially classical and folk traditions — also played a central role. Kerry’s parents were avid international folk dancers who, after raising their children, became highly regarded folk dance instructors.

Athletics were another key part of Kerry’s upbringing. He won swimming awards, worked as a summer camp lifeguard and swim instructor, played high school football, fenced, and embraced nearly any sport available to him. This eclectic, Renaissance-style upbringing — rooted in both intellectual and physical pursuits — remains a defining passion in his life.

Education

As a student at Roslyn High School, Kerry was actively involved in both academics and extracurricular activities. In addition to playing football, he captained the chess team, served as editor of both the yearbook and the literary magazine, presided over multiple science clubs, and was part of a short-lived but highly successful chemistry team.

Torn between potential careers in astrophysics, nuclear physics, and constitutional law, Kerry ultimately chose to seek a broader perspective on life. He enrolled at St. John’s College in Maryland, a small and academically rigorous institution focused on the Great Books of the Western World. The experience proved pivotal, immersing him in original texts spanning literature, philosophy, mathematics, science, and history, while also providing a foundational introduction to the theory of music. St. John’s gave structure to the intellectual curiosity he had cultivated since childhood and helped solidify the values of critical inquiry and classical education that would shape his future.

During his college years, Kerry ran a volunteer program that provided recreational activities for youth ward patients at Crownsville State Hospital. He also used his summers to broaden his horizons through a variety of hands-on experiences. In 1965, he worked for a homesteader (the father of a college friend) in the Alaskan woods near the town of Talkeetna. In 1966, he wrote a new edition of the college’s freshman lab manual. The following year, in 1967, he studied archaeology at Oxford University, focusing on the Roman period. After completing the summer semester, he participated in an excavation of a Roman villa on the outskirts of London.

Following his graduation from St. John’s College in 1968, Kerry traveled to Israel. His studies had sparked a deep interest in exploring his Jewish roots, and his reading of Voltaire had stirred a romantic curiosity about agricultural life (“il faut cultiver notre jardin”). He joined Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek and enrolled in an Ulpan — a program in which participants spent half their day working on the kibbutz and the other half studying Hebrew. After completing the course, Kerry remained on the kibbutz as a volunteer worker.

Though he deeply enjoyed the pastoral lifestyle, Kerry began to feel the absence of intellectual stimulation. Writing poetry in his head while driving a tractor or bulldozer wasn’t quite enough. The monthly arrival of Scientific American in the kibbutz library became a highly anticipated event and rekindled his curiosity. Having always enjoyed mathematics — and having heard that computer programming required similar thinking — he jumped at the first opportunity to enroll in an evening programming course. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of programming.

In the autumn of 1969, Kerry was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), where he served in an infantry unit. He is a frontline veteran, having participated in both the War of Attrition and, later as a reservist, the Yom Kippur War.

After completing his compulsory military service, Kerry was accepted into an entry-level computer programming position at Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), now known as Israel Aerospace Industries, in late 1972. This role marked a significant step in his career, and he quickly rose through the ranks. In 1975, he represented IAI at the National Conference on Data Processing in Jerusalem, where he delivered a presentation in Hebrew titled “COMFORT III.”

COMFORT III was a new report-generating language developed at IAI to replace an older system called COMPORT II. COMPORT II was an interpretive language, which made it slow and resource-heavy, especially on the large mainframe computers of that time. COMFORT III differed from its predecessor by accepting user-defined report parameters and using them to automatically generate, compile, and execute COBOL programs. At the time, COBOL was the predominant compiled language used in business computing. In the early 1970s, a system that could generate and compile its own code was almost unheard of. Today, over 50 years later, this idea is becoming more common with the rise of artificial intelligence.

Doctoral Studies and Postdoctoral Career

In the mid-1970s, Kerry returned to the United States to pursue a graduate education at Lehigh University. He earned a Master of Science in Industrial Engineering in 1978 and completed his Ph.D. in 1981. His doctoral dissertation, The EIDOS System: A Computer-Aided Methodology for Database Design, focused on automated database design. As part of his dissertation, Kerry wrote a fully operational program that used input-output analysis to generate database schemata in Fourth Normal Form.

In 1980, Kerry began his postdoctoral career at Bell Labs, which was widely regarded at the time as “the Mecca” of research and innovation. Following the breakup of the Bell System and the formation of the regional “Baby Bells” on January 1, 1984, he was recruited by the newly established NYNEX Corporation as part of a select group of Bell Labs employees.

At NYNEX, he led two pioneering taskforces: one focused on introducing personal computers — then a new technology — into the workplace, and the other on exploring applications for the emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI). In 1985, he served as both chair and presenter for the panel session Applied Artificial Intelligence: Future or Fantasy at the National Computer Conference in Chicago.

While he appreciated the technical challenges of working within the Bell System, Kerry found corporate life to be personally and professionally limiting. In 1985, he left NYNEX to launch his own consulting firm, CKN Knowledge Engineering, Inc. His consulting work spanned both IT system development and maintenance, as well as physical security assessments — particularly for sensitive government agencies, defense clients, and universities. He consulted for companies such as AT&T and ABB.

During this time, he also taught software engineering as an adjunct professor at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and served as the coach of the college's fencing team. In 1995, he closed CKN Knowledge Engineering and began a two-year tenure as Chief Information Officer for a U.S.-based ABB subsidiary.

After leaving ABB in 1997, Kerry founded Prometheus Consulting, a solo practice focused on high-level systems design and advisory services. During this period, he was approached to design a secure email system, or at least, one more secure than what was then commercially available. The result, based upon one of Kerry’s patents, was C-e-Mail™, a product of the V.N. Hermes, Inc. The system not only encrypted all messages and ran them through a virus scanner but also included protections against traffic monitoring. This patent went on to become one of his most cited.

In the early 2000s, Kerry also developed the concept for a secure file type called a Virtual Strongbox™. The system enabled users to create and share encrypted digital files while maintaining strict access controls defined by the file's owner, rather than a system administrator. Each Virtual Strongbox automatically generated a digitally signed audit trail to track access and activity.

In 2005, he formally founded Keneisys Corp.™ to bring the technology to market. Although the concept drew early interest from Apple Inc. and several major credit card companies, Kerry found that cybersecurity was not yet a top priority for many organizations. As a result, he returned to independent consulting and public speaking engagements, while also focusing on family — especially spending time with his aging parents and newly arriving grandchildren.

Crytica Security

Around 2017, Kerry had the opportunity to meet C. Lloyd Mahaffey. They immediately hit it off and spoke extensively about the vulnerabilities that plague all of the existing cybersecurity systems in the market. Their ongoing discussions evolved into the ideas that became the genesis of Crytica Security. The company was officially launched in 2018 with the goal of commercializing a new approach to malware detection: the patented Rapid Detection & Alert (RDA) system.

Like many startups, Crytica faced early challenges. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the company vacated its small downtown Reno office and transitioned to a fully virtual model. Crytica’s server farm was temporarily relocated to Kerry’s garage. As pandemic conditions improved, the company established a new headquarters in Reno, Nevada, and later opened a second office in Boise, Idaho. Plans for additional expansion are currently underway.

Crytica Security’s RDA system was designed to fill a significant gap in many cybersecurity systems: the inability to reliably and rapidly detect many strains of computer malware, especially new and previously undocumented strains. Crytica’s RDA was designed to detect at the time of injection, often within seconds, malware that is invisible to many other malware systems. With a native code binary of 100 KB or less, it was specifically developed to fit into and operate inside critical infrastructure and operational technology environments, especially those with limited system resources. 

Crytica’s RDA is currently deployed in a major metropolitan public utility and is in the process of being expanded into other critical infrastructure, manufacturing, and industrial systems. 

Patents and Publications

Kerry holds multiple U.S. patents related to cybersecurity, secure messaging, and malware detection. For Crytica’s RDA, Kerry was granted the following U.S. patents:

• US-11,711,378-B1, issued July 25th, 2023
• US-20230421575-A1, issued December 28th, 2023
• US-12261854-B2, issued March 25, 2025

Kerry has often been an invited speaker on topics ranging from cybersecurity to military history and social issues. He has presented at many conferences, including the National Computer Conference, where, in 1985, he chaired the session on artificial intelligence. He has been an invited speaker, giving talks on topics such as cybersecurity, financial crime and anti-money laundering strategies, secure email systems, and world history (especially military history).

Personal Pursuits 

Kerry has lifelong interests in music — particularly classical and international folk — which he considers a central part of his life. He modestly describes himself as someone who "plays at" playing the piano, guitar, mandolin, and recorder. Beyond music, he is a passionate student of history, literature, and philosophy, and is also an active poet and short story writer.

An avid sportsman, Kerry has participated in a wide range of athletic activities over the years, including body surfing, tennis, sailing, distance swimming, rock climbing, gymnastics, soccer, fencing, flag football, downhill skiing, hiking, and softball. He is still very active in the latter three. As a teenager, he worked as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. He later coached youth soccer at the club level, as well as youth gymnastics and college-level fencing. Throughout his life, he has participated in and periodically taught international folk dancing.