Renaud Deraison

Renaud Deraison is a French cybersecurity entrepreneur and vulnerability-research pioneer best known for creating the Nessus vulnerability scanner and for co-founding Tenable Network Security, the company that turned Nessus into a multi-billion-dollar security business. While Nessus's own technical history is documented separately, Deraison's personal career traces a path from a French secondary-school hobby project to two decades leading Tenable's engineering organization, and more recently into advisory and governance roles across the cybersecurity industry.

From Lycée Project to the United States

By his own account in the French business press, Deraison was still a lycée (secondary school) student in the late 1990s when he began writing Nessus as a hobby — "un passe-temps" — to detect vulnerabilities on computer networks. Reports that he was specifically 17 years old at the time are widely repeated across secondary sources but are not independently documented and should be treated as unverified. The tool's popularity within the small, close-knit vulnerability-research community of the late 1990s (which he has described as numbering roughly a hundred people) convinced him to pursue it full-time; he has said he left classes préparatoires, a competitive French post-secondary track, to keep up with demand, and relocated to the United States.

Co-Founding Tenable

On September 16, 2002, Deraison co-founded Tenable Network Security with Ron Gula and Jack Huffard, folding the Nessus project into the new company (some French-press profiles instead cite 2003). Deraison has described his career as unusually singular for the tech industry: "Technically, I have only known one company in my career, but it's as if I had known several, because I saw Tenable grow gradually and transform," he told Les Echos in 2022. He served as Tenable's chief technology officer — described in some later company biographies as "chief technology, research, and product officer" — through Tenable's July 2018 initial public offering on Nasdaq (ticker TENB) and the company's growth to roughly 1,600 employees and a multibillion-dollar valuation.

Patents and Standards Involvement

Deraison is listed as a co-inventor on multiple U.S. patents assigned to Tenable, including US 11,258,817 ("Rule-based assignment of criticality scores to assets," filed October 2018, granted February 2022) and US 11,487,879 (a threat-score prediction model, filed December 2018, granted November 2022), both concerned with automatically scoring the real-world risk posed by vulnerabilities and assets. Company biographies published around his later board appointments also credit him with a seat on the editorial/advisory structure of the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) program; this claim comes from company-supplied biographies rather than an independently verified CVE source and is noted here as such.

Later Career: From Operator to Advisor

By the mid-2020s, Deraison had begun taking on outside advisory and governance roles rather than day-to-day operating positions. On January 18, 2024, SecurityScorecard announced his appointment as senior advisor and chairman of its Corporate Advisory Board, alongside a seat on its Cybersecurity Advisory Board, citing his two decades in vulnerability management. On September 9, 2025, French detection-and-response vendor Sekoia.io announced that Deraison had joined its strategic council as an independent board member, alongside former French national cyber agency (ANSSI) director Guillaume Poupard. Although he has said he does not plan to return to live in France, Deraison has also spoken of wanting to help build an engineering hub there, reflecting continuing ties to the French tech ecosystem that produced him.

Legacy

Deraison's career is frequently cited in French and international tech press as an example of a hobbyist open-source project scaling into a Nasdaq-listed cybersecurity company, with Deraison himself remaining the throughline across two decades of Tenable's growth before diversifying into advisory roles across the vulnerability-management and threat-intelligence sector.

Timeline

• 1998While a lycée (secondary school) student in France, creates Nessus as a hobby open-source vulnerability scanner; reports that he was 17 at the time are widely repeated but not independently verified.
• 2002-09-16Co-founds Tenable Network Security with Ron Gula and Jack Huffard, folding the Nessus project into the new company, and relocates to the United States.
• 2018-07Tenable completes its initial public offering on Nasdaq (ticker TENB) while Deraison serves as chief technology officer.
• 2018-10-26Files, with five co-inventors, the U.S. patent application for an asset criticality-scoring system, later granted as US 11,258,817 (Feb. 2022), assigned to Tenable.
• 2018-12-28Files, with four co-inventors, the U.S. patent application for a threat-score prediction model, later granted as US 11,487,879 (Nov. 2022), assigned to Tenable.
• 2024-01-18Appointed senior advisor and chairman of SecurityScorecard's Corporate Advisory Board, and joins its Cybersecurity Advisory Board.
• 2025-09-09Joins the strategic council of French cybersecurity vendor Sekoia.io as an independent board member.