Christopher Gates

Christopher Gates is the Director of Cybersecurity at Innolitics. He has over 50+ years of experience developing and securing medical devices for numerous industry-leading device manufacturers and frequently collaborates with regulatory and standard bodies, including CISA, HSCC, OWASP, Bluetooth SIG, IEEE, and the SBOM Forum to present, define, and codify tools, techniques, and processes that enable the creation of secure medical devices. He is a co-chair for the HSCC’s Update and Patching working group and participates in more working groups than he cares to admit. He has currently been elected as H-ISAC’s MDM co-chair for the Medical Device Security Council.

Everywhere he goes, Christopher promotes the concepts of a secure total product lifecycle, an approach that eases the burden on developers and ensures high-quality products that work as intended to save and improve lives without putting patients at risk.

In 2020, he co-authored the first book on medical device security, Medical Device Cybersecurity for Engineers and Manufacturers (Artech House, Aug. 31, 2020. ISBN: 9781630818159), which was hailed as 2020’s “Cybersecurity Book of the Year” and spent multiple weeks as the #1 bestselling engineering textbook on Amazon. The book is currently in its second edition, with a third edition being planned. The book is meant to help alleviate the shortfall of security trained engineers in the medical device industry.

Christopher graduated from California State University Northridge with a B.S. in Computer Science and worked in various roles as a software/firmware engineer, systems engineer, project manager, and cybersecurity architect. His projects ranged from dozens of different medical devices, including ventilators, bedside devices, wearables, and implantables. Outside of the medical device industry, he has also created control systems for an early all-electric motorcycle and consulted for Disneyland.

Christopher is one of those rare people who is both a highly experienced medical device development engineer as well as a cybersecurity subject matter expert. This gives him a unique perspective on the tools and techniques utilized to secure medical devices.

Christopher currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife (PJ) of over 4 decades and their Siberian Husky (Goren).