I am an emeritus professor of computer science at The George Washington University (GW). During my academic career, I initiated and developed the first regularly offered university course on computer security at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970.  My second book, Modern Methods for Computer Security and Privacy, published in 1977, was a standard textbook in the few computer security courses offered at the time around the world.  My other books, all anthologies, captured the state of cybersecurity and privacy at various times:

a)         Security and Privacy in Computer Systems in 1973, the year of the first international connections with the ARPANET

b)         Computers and Privacy in the Next Decade in 1980, after the advent of public-key cryptography

c)         Rogue Programs: Viruses, Worms, and Trojan Horses in 1990, after viruses and other malware were becoming common problems

d)         Building in Big Brother: The Encryption Policy Debate in 1995, during cryptographic policy debates related to the proposed Clipper chip.

 

A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, I institutionalized the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy.  I have served on a number of Advisory Committees including those of Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and IBM.  I chaired the Information Security Subcommittee of the IEEE Committee on Communications and Information Policy and am a member of relevant subcommittees of the ACM US Technology Policy Committee.

 

My research has spanned multiple aspects of cybersecurity, including models and metrics for secure computer systems, cryptography policy, risk analysis, societal vulnerability to computer system failures, improved architectures for in-vehicle security systems, a smart-card-protected operating system, portable security labs, medical record security and privacy, and statistical inference for data mining. 

 

My thought leadership has included the organizing of several projects that pushed forward emerging areas of cybersecurity over decades.   These included a 1987 workshop that was one of the first to explore issues related to Internet voting; a 1999 study of foreign encryption products that explored the effect of the United States export control regime on American and foreign manufacturers and produced his Congressional testimony and the display of an array of the products purchased at the time; a 2004 workshop that explored a National Cyber Security Exercise for Universities that  sparked several cybersecurity educational competitions; a 2010 workshop that articulated steps to insure that universities produce appropriately educated individuals for the cybersecurity workforce; and the development  of new courses as the field of cybersecurity grew, that focused on e-commerce security, information policy, and cybersecurity and governance.

 

I was thesis advisor for nine doctoral students and initiated GW’s CyberCorps scholarship program that has produced over a hundred cybersecurity experts with degrees in at least ten majors. These graduates have gone on to work for dozens of different government agencies and many have then gone on to the private sector, several starting their own companies.

 

In the private sector, I developed an early personal computer-based risk analysis system, RISKCALC, that for a short time was a commercial product.   I also serve occasionally as an expert witness on issues related to my expertise.

 

I earned his my Ph. D. in Computer Science in 1970 from Stanford University, after a B.S. in Mathematics from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University).  

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Recently, I have been asked to present material on artificial intelligence and its implications.  Little did I know that while I was attending the artificial intelligence classes at Stanford of one of the legendary founders of the field, Professor John McCarthy, that that knowledge would be called upon today.