Simson Garfinkel

Not to be confused with Simon and Garfunkel.

Simson Leon Garfinkel
(By Simson L. Garfinkel)
Born	1965 (age 59–60)
Nationality	United States
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	National Institute of Standards and Technology
Alma mater	MIT (SB, SB, SB 1983) Columbia University (MS 1988) MIT (PhD 2005)
Doctoral advisor	David D. Clark
Known for	UNIX-HATERS Handbook Cross-Drive Analysis Database Nation Practical UNIX and Internet Security
Notable awards	Department of Defense Value Engineering Achievement Award Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award

Simson L. Garfinkel (born 1965), joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersberg, Maryland, in January 2015 as Senior Advisor, Information Access Division. His current research includes privacy and data de-identification.

Garfinkel was formerly an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California from 2006 to January 2015. 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 is 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 patents, mostly in the field of computer security.

Garfinkel obtained three SB degrees from MIT in 1987; a MS in journalism from Columbia University in 1988; and a PhD 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. In 2012 he was named a Fellow of the ACM. Today Garfinkel lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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 (NPS) in Monterey, California, as an Associate Professor of Computer Science. He moved to Arlington, Virginia, in June 2010 to help NPS with its research aims in the National Capital Region.

Bibliography

Books

• (review by Peter G. Neumann 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)

Significant academic articles

• Beverly, Robert, Simson Garfinkel and Greg Cardwell, "Forensic Carving of Network Packets and Associated Data Structures", DFRWS 2011, Aug. 1-3, 2011, New Orleans, LA. BEST PAPER AWARD (Acceptance rate: 23%, 14/62)
• 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, Alex Nelson, Vassil Roussev 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 AOHell, re-published in the RISKS Digest. First known published account of phishing.)

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 School
• Vineyard.NET home page
• Sandstorm Enterprises home page