Parisa Tabriz

Early Life and Education

Parisa Tabriz was born in 1983 to an Iranian father, a physician, and a Polish-American mother, a nurse. She grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and is the older sister of two brothers. She was not exposed to coding or computer science until her first year at university.

Tabriz initially enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to study computer engineering, where she quickly developed a deeper interest in coding and computer science. She earned both a Bachelor of Computer Science and a Master of Computer Science from the university. Her graduate research focused on wireless security and attacks on privacy-enhancing technologies, and she co-authored academic papers with her advisor Nikita Borisov. During her time at Illinois, she joined a student computer security club — motivated in part by having her own website hacked — and became an active participant in the campus security community.

Career

While still in college, Tabriz was offered a summer internship with Google's security team. She joined the company full-time a few months after graduating in 2007. Early in her tenure, while preparing to attend a conference in Tokyo, she chose to list her job title on her business card as "Security Princess" rather than the standard "information security engineer," finding the conventional title too dry and the alternative appropriately ironic. The title became a semi-official designation that followed her throughout her career at Google.

In her early years at Google, Tabriz trained staff interested in security and worked with youth at DEFCON and through the Girl Scouts of the USA to introduce a more diverse population to the field of computer security.

Chrome Security and HTTPS Advocacy

In 2013, Tabriz assumed responsibility for the security of Google Chrome. She presented the talk "Got SSL?" at the Chrome Dev Summit and led a sustained effort to drive adoption of the HTTPS protocol across the web. In 2015, fewer than 50% of traffic observed by Chrome was encrypted over HTTPS; by 2019, that figure had risen to between 73% and 95% across all platforms. Tabriz has also publicly spoken out against government interception of HTTPS connections on the public internet.

Project Zero

In 2016, Tabriz took over responsibility for Project Zero, Google's offensive security research group dedicated to discovering zero-day vulnerabilities and reducing the harm caused by targeted attacks.

OURSA and Advocacy

In 2018, Tabriz served as a keynote speaker at the Black Hat Conference, where she emphasized addressing the root causes of security problems, investing in long-term projects, and building coalitions that extend beyond the traditional security community. That same year, in response to the RSA Conference featuring only one non-male keynote speaker among a lineup of 20, Tabriz co-founded the Our Security Advocates conference, known as OURSA. Within five days, she and fellow organizers assembled a speaker lineup of experts from underrepresented backgrounds, including 14 women.

In 2020, Tabriz became head of Product and Engineering for Google Chrome, and subsequently rose to the role of Vice President and General Manager of the browser.

Recognition

Tabriz has received recognition from several prominent publications for her contributions to technology and security. She appeared on Forbes' "30 Under 30" list of people to watch in the technology industry in 2012, on Wired's "20 Tech Visionaries Creating the Future" list in 2017, and on Fortune's "40 Under 40" list in 2018.