Ross J. Anderson

For other people named Ross Anderson, see Ross Anderson (disambiguation).
Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson in 2008
Born Ross John Anderson
(1956-09-15) 15 September 1956[1]
Residence near Sandy, Bedfordshire United Kingdom
Nationality British
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD)
Thesis Robust Computer Security (1995)
Doctoral advisor Roger Needham[4]
Doctoral students
Known for
  • Banking security
  • Security economics
  • Information policy
  • Serpent (cipher)
  • University of Cambridge politics
  • Security Engineering book[5]
Notable awards
Website
www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14

Ross John Anderson, FRS, FREng[7] (born 15 September 1956)[1] is a researcher, writer, and industry consultant in security engineering.[5] He is Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge[8] where he is part of the Security Group.[9][10][11]

Education

Anderson was educated at the High School of Glasgow.[1] In 1978, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and natural science from Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently received a qualification in computer engineering. Anderson worked in the avionics and banking industry before moving in 1992 back to the University of Cambridge, to work on his doctorate under the supervision of Roger Needham[12] and start his career as an academic researcher.[3] He received his PhD in 1995, and became a lecturer in the same year.[1]

Research

Anderson's research interests[2][4][9][10][13][14][15] are in security, cryptology, dependability and technology policy.[2] In cryptography, he designed with Eli Biham the BEAR, LION and Tiger cryptographic primitives, and co-wrote with Biham and Lars Knudsen the block cipher Serpent, one of the finalists in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition. He has also discovered weaknesses in the FISH cipher and designed the stream cipher Pike.

In 1998, Anderson founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a think tank and lobbying group on information-technology policy.

Anderson is also a founder of the UK-Crypto mailing list and the economics of security research domain.[16]

He is well-known among Cambridge academics as an outspoken defender of academic freedoms, intellectual property and other matters of university politics. He is engaged in the ″Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms″[17] and has been an elected member of Cambridge University Council since 2002.[18] In January 2004, the student newspaper Varsity declared Anderson to be Cambridge University's "most powerful person".[19]

In 2002, he became an outspoken critic of trusted computing proposals, in particular Microsoft's Palladium operating system vision.[20]

Anderson's TCPA FAQ has been characterised by IBM TC researcher David R. Safford as "full of technical errors" and of "presenting speculation as fact."[21]

For years Anderson has been arguing that by their nature large databases will never be free of abuse by breaches of security. He has said that if a large system is designed for ease of access it becomes insecure; if made watertight it becomes impossible to use. This is sometimes known as Anderson's Rule.[22]

Anderson is the author of Security Engineering, published by Wiley in 2001.[5] He was the founder and editor of Computer and Communications Security Reviews.

Anderson at King's College London, January 2016

After the vast Global surveillance disclosure leaked by Edward Snowden beginning in June 2013 Anderson suggested one way to begin stamping out the British state's unaccountable involvement in this NSA spying scandal is to entirely end the domestic secret services. Anderson: “Were I a legislator, I would simply abolish MI5." Anderson notes the only way this kind of systemic data collection has been made possible was through the business models of private industry. The value of information-driven web companies such as Facebook and Google is built around their ability to gather vast tracts of data. It was something the intelligence agencies would have struggled with alone.[23]

Awards and honours

Anderson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009. His nomination reads:

“ Professor Ross Anderson, Personal Chair in Security Engineering, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

Ross Anderson is a pioneer and world leader in security engineering, and is distiinguished for starting a number of new areas of research in hardware, software and systems.

His early work on how systems fail established a base of empirical evidence for building threat models for a wide range of applications from banking to healthcare.

He has made trailblazing contributions that helped establish a number of new re-esearch (sic) topics, including security usability, hardware tamper-resistance, information hiding, and the analysis of application programming interfaces.

He is also one of the founders of the study of information security economics, which not only illuminates where the most effective attacks and defences may be found, but is also of fundamental importance to making policy for the information society.[6]

 ”

Anderson was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng)[7] in 2009.[1][3][24]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 ANDERSON, Prof. Ross John. Who's Who. 2014 (online edition via Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. 1 2 3 Ross J. Anderson's publications indexed by Google Scholar
  3. 1 2 3 Curriculum Vitae – Ross Anderson, May 2007
  4. 1 2 3 Ross J. Anderson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. 1 2 3 Anderson, Ross (2008). Security engineering: a guide to building dependable distributed systems. New York: John Wiley. ISBN 0-470-06852-3.
  6. 1 2 "EC/2009/02: Anderson, Ross". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 30 July 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 "List of Fellows".
  8. ↑ The Blue Book – "The Computer Laboratory: an Introduction”, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, August 2007 Archived 5 August 2012 at the Wayback Machine.
  9. 1 2 Ross J. Anderson's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier. (subscription required)
  10. 1 2 Ross J. Anderson from the ACM Digital Library
  11. ↑ Anderson, R. J. (1999). "Information technology in medical practice: Safety and privacy lessons from the United Kingdom". The Medical journal of Australia. 170 (4): 181–4. PMID 10078187.
  12. ↑ Anderson, Ross John (2014). Robust Computer Security (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
  13. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  14. ↑ Ross J. Anderson at DBLP Bibliography Server
  15. ↑ Petitcolas, F. A. P.; Anderson, R. J.; Kuhn, M. G. (1999). "Information hiding-a survey". Proceedings of the IEEE. 87 (7): 1062. doi:10.1109/5.771065.
  16. ↑ Ross Anderson: Why information security is hard – an economic perspective, ACSAC 2001.
  17. ↑ Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms
  18. ↑ Election to the Council: Notices 2 December 2002 and 7 November 2006, Cambridge University Reporter
  19. ↑ Cambridge Power 100, Varsity, Issue 591, 16 January 2004
  20. ↑ Ross Anderson: ‘Trusted Computing’ Frequently Asked Questions, August 2003
  21. ↑ http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/gsal.TCG.html/$FILE/tcpa_rebuttal.pdf
  22. ↑ Guardian newspaper article on a security breach, in which Anderson's Rule is formulated
  23. ↑ Cambridge's Head of Cryptography: I Would Abolish MI5, Forbes, 3 January 2013
  24. ↑ Technology Visionaries: Professor Ross Anderson FRS FREng – Royal Academy of Engineering on YouTube, Royal Academy of Engineering
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