Simson Garfinkel
Encyclopedia
Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, California. Garfinkel is regarded as a leader in the fields of Digital forensics
and Usable Security. In addition to his academic work, Garfinkel is a journalist
, an entrepreneur
, and an inventor, his work in all three concerned with computer security
, privacy
and information technology
.
Garfinkel is the author or co-author of 14 books and the author of more than a thousand articles. He is a contributing writer for Technology Review
and has written as a freelancer for many publications including Wired magazine, The Boston Globe
, Privacy Journal and CSO Magazine. His work for CSO Magazine earned him five regional and national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Awards in 2003 and 2004.
As an entrepreneur Garfinkel founded Vineyard.NET, an Internet service provider on Martha's Vineyard, and Sandstorm Enterprises
, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel holds six patent
s, mostly in the field of computer security.
Garfinkel obtained three S.B.
degrees from MIT
in 1987; a M.S.
in journalism
from Columbia University
in 1988; and a Ph.D.
in computer science
from MIT in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University
from September 2005 through August 2008. Today Garfinkel lives in Arlington, VA
.
In 1991, while a Senior Editor at NeXTWORLD Magazine, Garfinkel created an address book program for the NeXT Computer called SBook. One of SBook's most popular features was a search field that performed a full-text search of all of the records in the address book with each keypress. This kind of search is now standard on many computer programs, including Apple's Mail application and Mozilla Thunderbird. It is believed that SBook was the first program to incorporate this kind of search technology.
In 1995, Garfinkel moved to Martha's Vineyard and started Vineyard.NET, the Vineyard's first Internet Service Provider. Vineyard.NET was bought by Broadband2Wireless, a wireless ISP, in 2000. The company went bankrupt in September 2001, and Garfinkel bought Vineyard.NET back from the bankruptcy court.
In 2003, Garfinkel and abhi shelat published an article in IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine reporting on an experiment in which they purchased 158 used hard drives from a variety of sources and checked to see whether they still contained readable data. Roughly one third of the drives appeared to have information that was highly confidential and should have been erased prior to the drive's resale.
In 2006, Garfinkel introduced Cross-Drive Analysis, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm for automatically reconstructing social networks from hard drives and other kinds of data carrying devices that are likely to contain pseudo-unique information.
In September 2006, Garfinkel joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School
in Monterey, CA as an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He moved to Arlington, VA in June 2010 to help NPS with its research aims in the National Capital Region.
and review by Eugene Spafford, in the RISKS Digest
) (review by Rob Slade in the RISKS Digest
) (review by Peter G. Neumann
in the RISKS Digest
)
, re-published in the RISKS Digest
)
External links =
Naval Postgraduate School
The Naval Postgraduate School is an accredited research university operated by the United States Navy. Located in Monterey, California, it grants master's degrees, Engineer's degrees and doctoral degrees...
in Monterey, California. Garfinkel is regarded as a leader in the fields of Digital forensics
Digital forensics
Digital forensics is a branch of forensic science encompassing the recovery and investigation of material found in digital devices, often in relation to computer crime...
and Usable Security. In addition to his academic work, Garfinkel is a journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, an entrepreneur
Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...
, and an inventor, his work in all three concerned with computer security
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...
, privacy
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...
and information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
.
Garfinkel is the author or co-author of 14 books and the author of more than a thousand articles. He is a contributing writer for Technology Review
Technology Review
Technology Review is a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was founded in 1899 as "The Technology Review", and was re-launched without the "The" in its name on April 23, 1998 under then publisher R. Bruce Journey...
and has written as a freelancer for many publications including Wired magazine, The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe is an American daily newspaper based in Boston, Massachusetts. The Boston Globe has been owned by The New York Times Company since 1993...
, Privacy Journal and CSO Magazine. His work for CSO Magazine earned him five regional and national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Awards in 2003 and 2004.
As an entrepreneur Garfinkel founded Vineyard.NET, an Internet service provider on Martha's Vineyard, and Sandstorm Enterprises
Sandstorm Enterprises
Sandstorm Enterprises is a computer security software vendor founded in 1998 by Simson Garfinkel, James van Bokkelen, and Dan Geer. In January 2010, it was purchased by Niksun Enterprises.Sandstorm is located in the greater Boston Area...
, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel holds six patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
s, mostly in the field of computer security.
Garfinkel obtained three S.B.
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
degrees from MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
in 1987; a M.S.
Master of Science
A Master of Science is a postgraduate academic master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in the sciences including the social sciences.-Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay:...
in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
in 1988; and a Ph.D.
Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
in computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
from MIT in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
from September 2005 through August 2008. Today Garfinkel lives in Arlington, VA
Arlington County, Virginia
Arlington County is a county in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The land that became Arlington was originally donated by Virginia to the United States government to form part of the new federal capital district. On February 27, 1801, the United States Congress organized the area as a subdivision of...
.
Research
Garfinkel's early research was in the field of optical storage. While he was an undergraduate at the MIT Media Laboratory Garfinkel developed CDFS, the first file system for write-once optical disk systems. During the summer of 1987 he worked at Brown University's IRIS Project, where he developed a server allowing CDROMs to be shared over a network simultaneously by multiple workstations.In 1991, while a Senior Editor at NeXTWORLD Magazine, Garfinkel created an address book program for the NeXT Computer called SBook. One of SBook's most popular features was a search field that performed a full-text search of all of the records in the address book with each keypress. This kind of search is now standard on many computer programs, including Apple's Mail application and Mozilla Thunderbird. It is believed that SBook was the first program to incorporate this kind of search technology.
In 1995, Garfinkel moved to Martha's Vineyard and started Vineyard.NET, the Vineyard's first Internet Service Provider. Vineyard.NET was bought by Broadband2Wireless, a wireless ISP, in 2000. The company went bankrupt in September 2001, and Garfinkel bought Vineyard.NET back from the bankruptcy court.
In 2003, Garfinkel and abhi shelat published an article in IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine reporting on an experiment in which they purchased 158 used hard drives from a variety of sources and checked to see whether they still contained readable data. Roughly one third of the drives appeared to have information that was highly confidential and should have been erased prior to the drive's resale.
In 2006, Garfinkel introduced Cross-Drive Analysis, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm for automatically reconstructing social networks from hard drives and other kinds of data carrying devices that are likely to contain pseudo-unique information.
In September 2006, Garfinkel joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School
Naval Postgraduate School
The Naval Postgraduate School is an accredited research university operated by the United States Navy. Located in Monterey, California, it grants master's degrees, Engineer's degrees and doctoral degrees...
in Monterey, CA as an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He moved to Arlington, VA in June 2010 to help NPS with its research aims in the National Capital Region.
Books
(review by Peter G. NeumannPeter G. Neumann
Peter G. Neumann is a researcher who has worked on the Multics operating system in the 1960s. He edits the Computer Risks columns for ACM Software Engineering Notes and Communications of the ACM. He founded ACM SIGSOFT and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.He studied at Harvard University ,...
and review by Eugene Spafford, in the RISKS Digest
RISKS Digest
The RISKS Digest or Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. The editor is Peter G. Neumann....
) (review by Rob Slade in the RISKS Digest
RISKS Digest
The RISKS Digest or Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. The editor is Peter G. Neumann....
) (review by Peter G. Neumann
Peter G. Neumann
Peter G. Neumann is a researcher who has worked on the Multics operating system in the 1960s. He edits the Computer Risks columns for ACM Software Engineering Notes and Communications of the ACM. He founded ACM SIGSOFT and is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and AAAS.He studied at Harvard University ,...
in the RISKS Digest
RISKS Digest
The RISKS Digest or Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. The editor is Peter G. Neumann....
)
Significant academic articles
- Garfinkel, S., Parker-Wood, A., Huynh, D., and Migletz, J., A Solution to the Multi-User Carved Data Ascription Problem, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, December 2010.
- Garfinkel, Simson, Digital Forensics Research: The Next 10 Years, DFRWS 2010, Portland, OR, August 2010
- Garfinkel, Farrell, Roussev and Dinolt, Bringing Science to Digital Forensics with Standardized Forensic Corpora, DFRWS 2009, Montreal, Canada. (slides) BEST PAPER AWARD.
- Garfinkel, Simson., Vassil Roussev, Alex Nelson and Douglas White, Using purpose-built functions and block hashes to enable small block and sub-file forensics, DFRWS 2010, Portland, OR
- Garfinkel, S., and Cranor, L., Institutional Review Boards and Your Research, Communications of the ACM, June 2010.
- Garfinkel, S., and Smith, M., "Data Surveillance" (Guest Editor's Introduction), IEEE Security and Privacy, November/December 2006
- Garfinkel, S., "Forensic Feature Extraction and Cross-Drive Analysis," Digital Investigation, Volume 3, Supplement 1, September 2006, Pages 71—81.
- Garfinkel, S., Juels, A., Pappu, R., "RFID Privacy: An Overview of Problems and Proposed Solutions," IEEE Security and Privacy, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp. 34–43, May–June 2005.
- Garfinkel, S. "Leaderless Resistance Today", First Monday, 8:3, March 3, 2003.
Significant journalistic articles
(Wired Magazine's cover article about HavenCo and Sealand) (an article about AOHellAOHell
AOHell was a tool that greatly simplified 'cracking' online using AOL.-Origin:Released in 1994 by hackers known as "The Rizzer" & "Da Chronic", AOHell provided a number of utilities which ran on top of the America Online client software...
, re-published in the RISKS Digest
RISKS Digest
The RISKS Digest or Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. The editor is Peter G. Neumann....
)
External links =
- Simson Garfinkel's home page, including biographical information, his CV and current research projects.
- Simson Garfinkel's official website at the Naval Postgraduate SchoolNaval Postgraduate SchoolThe Naval Postgraduate School is an accredited research university operated by the United States Navy. Located in Monterey, California, it grants master's degrees, Engineer's degrees and doctoral degrees...
- Vineyard.NET home page
- Sandstorm Enterprises home page