Ross J. Anderson

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Ross J. Anderson

FRS FRSE FREng FIMA FIET
Anderson in 2008
Born
Ross John Anderson

(1956-09-15)15 September 1956[4]
Died28 March 2024(2024-03-28) (aged 67)
Cambridge, England
NationalityBritish
EducationHigh School of Glasgow
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge (MA, PhD)
Known for
  • Banking security
  • Security economics
  • Information policy
  • Serpent (cipher)
  • University of Cambridge politics
  • Security Engineering book[5]
AwardsLovelace Medal (2015)
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisRobust Computer Security (1995)
Doctoral advisorRoger Needham[3]
Doctoral students
Websitewww.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/ Edit this at Wikidata

Ross John Anderson FRS FRSE FREng FIMA FIET[6][7][8][4] (15 September 1956 – 28 March 2024)[9] was a British researcher, author, and industry consultant in security engineering.[5] He was Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge[10] where he was part of the University's security group.[11][12][13]

Education[edit]

Anderson was educated at the High School of Glasgow.[4] In 1978, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and natural science from the University of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently received a qualification in computer engineering. Anderson worked in the avionics and banking industry before moving back to the University of Cambridge in 1992, to work on his doctorate under the supervision of Roger Needham[14] and start his career as an academic researcher.[2] He received his PhD in 1995.[14]

Research and career[edit]

Anderson on Malware (2010)

Anderson was appointed a lecturer at Cambridge in 1995.[4] In addition to teaching at the University of Cambridge, he also taught at the University of Edinburgh.[15]

Anderson's research interests[1][3][11] were in security, cryptology, dependability and technology policy.[1] In cryptography, he designed with Eli Biham the BEAR, LION and Tiger cryptographic primitives,[16][17] and co-wrote with Biham and Lars Knudsen the block cipher Serpent, one of the finalists in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition.[18] He also discovered weaknesses in the FISH cipher and designed the stream cipher Pike.[19]

Anderson always campaigned for computer security to be studied in a wider social context. Many of his writings emphasised the human, social, and political dimension of security. On online voting, for example, he wrote "When you move from voting in person to voting at home (whether by post, by phone or over the Internet) it vastly expands the scope for vote buying and coercion",[20] making the point that it's not just a question of whether the encryption can be cracked.

In 1998, Anderson founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a think tank and lobbying group on information-technology policy.[21]

Anderson was also a founder of the UK-Crypto mailing list and the economics of security research domain.[22]

Anderson was well-known among Cambridge academics as an outspoken defender of academic freedoms, intellectual property and other matters of university politics. He was engaged in the "Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms"[23] and had been an elected member of Cambridge University Council since 2002.[24] In January 2004, the student newspaper Varsity declared Anderson to be Cambridge University's "most powerful person".[25]

In 2002, he became an outspoken critic of trusted computing proposals, in particular Microsoft's Palladium operating system vision.[26]

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."[27]

For years Anderson argued that by their nature large databases will never be free of abuse by breaches of security. He 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.[28]

Anderson was the author of several editions of Security Engineering, which was initially published by Wiley in 2001.[5][15] He was the founder and editor of Computer and Communications Security Reviews.[2]

After the vast global surveillance disclosures 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 was to entirely end the domestic secret services. Anderson: "Were I a legislator, I would simply abolish MI5". Anderson noted the only way this kind of systemic data collection was 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.[29]

Anderson was a critic of smart meters, writing that there are various privacy and energy security concerns.[30]

Awards and honours[edit]

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 was a pioneer and world leader in security engineering, and is distinguished 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.

Anderson made trailblazing contributions that helped establish a number of new research topics, including security usability, hardware tamper-resistance, information hiding, and the analysis of application programming interfaces.

Anderson was 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.[31]

Anderson was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 2009.[7][8][4][2] He was a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge[32] and awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal in 2015.[15]

Death[edit]

Anderson died unexpectedly at his home in Cambridge on 28 March 2024, at the age of 67.[9][15]


References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c Ross J. Anderson publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  2. ^ a b c d Curriculum Vitae – Ross Anderson, May 2007
  3. ^ a b c Ross J. Anderson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ a b c d e Anon (2014). "Anderson, Prof. Ross John". Who's Who (online edition via Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U70837. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  5. ^ a b c Anderson, Ross (2008). Security engineering: a guide to building dependable distributed systems. New York: John Wiley. ISBN 978-0-470-06852-6.
  6. ^ "Fellowship of the RSE: Professor Ross Anderson".
  7. ^ a b "The Royal Academy of Engineering Annual Report 2009/2010".
  8. ^ a b "List of Fellows".
  9. ^ a b Beresford, Alastair (2024). "Ross Anderson, 1956 - 2024".
  10. ^ The Blue Book – "The Computer Laboratory: an Introduction", University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, August 2007 Archived 5 August 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ a b Ross J. Anderson's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  12. ^ Ross J. Anderson author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  13. ^ 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. doi:10.5694/j.1326-5377.1999.tb127721.x. PMID 10078187. S2CID 16255335.
  14. ^ a b Anderson, Ross John (2014). Robust Computer Security. cam.ac.uk (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. OCLC 53659223. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.338198.
  15. ^ a b c d "Ross Anderson, professor and famed author of 'Security Engineering,' passes away". The Record. 29 March 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2024.
  16. ^ Ross Anderson and Eli Biham. "Two Practical and Provably Secure Block Ciphers: BEAR and LION" (PDF).
  17. ^ Anderson, Ross; Biham, Eli (1996). "Tiger: A Fast New Hash Function". In Gollmann, Dieter (ed.). Fast Software Encryption. Cambridge: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 89–97. doi:10.1007/3-540-60865-6_46. ISBN 978-3-540-60865-3.
  18. ^ "Serpent: A Candidate Block Cipher for the Advanced Encryption Standard".
  19. ^ Anderson, Ross J. (1995), "On Fibonacci keystream generators", Fast Software Encryption, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1008, Springer-Verlag, pp. 346–352, doi:10.1007/3-540-60590-8_26, ISBN 978-3-540-60590-4
  20. ^ Nicole Kobie (30 March 2015). "Why electronic voting isn't secure – but may be safe enough".
  21. ^ Beresford, Alastair (3 April 2024). "Ross Anderson, 1956–2024". Department of Computer Science and Technology. cam.ac.uk. University of Cambridge.
  22. ^ Ross Anderson: Why information security is hard – an economic perspective Archived 11 October 2006 at the Wayback Machine, ACSAC 2001.
  23. ^ Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms
  24. ^ Election to the Council: Notices 2 December 2002 and 7 November 2006, Cambridge University Reporter
  25. ^ Cambridge Power 100, Varsity, Issue 591, 16 January 2004
  26. ^ Ross Anderson: 'Trusted Computing' Frequently Asked Questions, August 2003
  27. ^ http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/gsal.TCG.html/$FILE/tcpa_rebuttal.pdf[permanent dead link]
  28. ^ Porter, Henry (2009). "Nine sacked for breaching core ID card database". theguardian.com. London: The Guardian. Anderson's Rule means you cannot construct a database with scale, functionality and security because if you design a large system for ease of access it becomes insecure, while if you make it watertight it becomes impossible to use
  29. ^ Cambridge's Head of Cryptography: I Would Abolish MI5, Forbes, 3 January 2013
  30. ^ The Foundation for Information Policy Research Consultation response on Smart Meters Archived 13 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  31. ^ "EC/2009/02: Anderson, Ross". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 7 July 2019.
  32. ^ "Professor Ross Anderson FRS, FREng". Churchill College, Cambridge. Retrieved 14 May 2021.
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