What Price Insularity? Dialogs about Computer Security Failings
It is risky for technologists to ignore the non-technical context in which their systems will be deployed, just as it is risky for policy makers to ignore the limits and potential of technology. Yet such insularity is all too common. The results are unfortunate but not surprising. This lecture explores the structure dialogs take to bring about what might be termed "security failings" by revisiting: identity theft, electronic voting, digital right management, and the overall vulnerabilities of today's deployed software.
Fred B. Schneider is a professor at Cornell's Computer Science Department, director of the AFRL/Cornell Information Assurance Institute, and chief scientist of the NSF "TRUST" (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology) Science and Technology Center, a collaboration of UC Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, Stanford, and Vanderbilt.
Schneider has a Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook, and a D.Sc. [honoris causa] from the Univ of Newcastle upon Tyne ('03). He is a fellow of AAAS and ACM, and was named Professor-at-Large at University of Tromso (Norway) in 1996.
In addition to chairing the National Research Council's study committee on information systems trustworthiness and editing Trust in Cyberspace, Schneider has written a graduate textbook on concurrent programming and an undergraduate one on logic and discrete mathematics.
His research addresses problems associated with making distributed and concurrent systems trustworthy. His early work was in formal methods and methodologies for concurrent programming and in protocols for fault-tolerance. More recently, his attention has turned to topics in computer security.
