Cybersecurity
-

CISAC Conference Room

Jon Lindsay Research Fellow Speaker IGCC
Timothy Junio Cybersecurity Fellow Speaker CISAC
Jonathan Mayer Cybersecurity Fellow Commentator CISAC
Andrew K. Woods Cybersecurity Fellow Commentator CISAC
Seminars
-

CISAC Conference Room

Andrew K. Woods Cybersecurity Postdoctoral Fellow Speaker CISAC

Department of Political Science
Encina Hall West, Rm. 310
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-4031
0
William Bennett Munro Professor in Political Science
Chair of the Department of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Senior Fellow, Stanford King Center on Global Development
Landreth Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
CDDRL Affiliated Faculty
CISAC Affiliated Faculty
michael_tomz.jpg PhD

Michael Tomz is the William Bennett Munro Professor in Political Science and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford King Center on Global Development, and the Landreth Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Tomz has published in the fields of international relations, American politics, comparative politics, and statistical methods. He is the author of Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt across Three Centuries and numerous articles in political science and economics journals.

Tomz received the International Studies Association’s Karl Deutsch Award, given to a scholar who, within 10 years of earning a Ph.D., has made the most significant contribution to the study of international relations. He has also won the Giovanni Sartori Award for the best book developing or applying qualitative methods; the Jack L. Walker Award for the best article on Political Organizations and Parties; the best paper award from the APSA section on Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior; the best paper award from the APSA section on Experimental Research; and the Okidata Best Research Software Award. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

Tomz has received numerous teaching awards, including the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Cox Medal for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research. In 2017 he received Stanford’s highest teaching honor, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Tomz holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University; a master’s degree from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. He has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Hoover Institution, the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, and the International Monetary Fund.

Michael Tomz Professor of Political Science Commentator Stanford University
Seminars
-

There are three major components of Cyber security from China’s perspective: Internet information management, Civilian cyber security, and Cyber warfare.

The Chinese government worries that misinformation, dissent opinions and dissemination of rumors could cause social instability, and thus overthrow the regime. As a result, the government has taken many approaches to manage the information in cyberspace. Can the Chinese government fully control the information flow? If not, why?

China has 500 million netizens, more than any other country in the world. How do the government and companies deal with privacy and cyber crime?

Cyber attack from China is widely reported in US media. How do Chinese view US cyber warfare capability? Can "Pearl Harbor" happen in cyberspace?

A better understanding of these questions could be helpful for shaping US cyber policies on China.


Ting Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at CISAC. His research concerns on space debris problems, ASAT weapons, and cybersecurity in China. Before coming to CISAC in 2011, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Cornell University. He received a PhD at the Beihang University in China. His PhD dissertation was titled "Orbital Debris Evolution and Threat to Spacecraft." He also holds a B.A. in aerospace engineering from Beihang University and has worked at the Shanghai Institute of Satellite Engineering. He was a visiting scholar at the Union of Concerned Scientists in 2003, where he began to be interested in security issues.

CISAC Conference Room

Ting Wang Post-doctoral fellow Speaker CISAC
Seminars
-

In 1990, hypertext was a utopian conjecture. Since then, a hypertext system called the World Wide Web not only become the predominant medium of human communication, but also one of the primary methods for distributing software. Obviously, this transition has had implications for subjects of geopolitical interest including software security, political discourse, and the ability of states to surveil their citizens' communications and reading habits.

Because it was hard enough to build a global hypertext system in the first place, security was generally an afterthought in the design of the World Wide Web. One necessary component of a secure website is HTTPS encryption, but it is still only used correctly by a tiny fraction of websites. Any website that allows http:// as well as https:// is inherently vulnerable to network surveillance, account hijacking, and other forms of insecurity. To make matters worse, HTTPS itself has been plagued by numerous security problems and design flaws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been engaged in a series of projects to encrypt the entire Web, retiring the insecure HTTP protocol, and ensuring that "HTTPS" actually delivers what it promises. These projects include HTTPS Everywhere, the SSL Observatory, Sovereign Keys, and efforts to persuade major sites to deploy HTTPS. In this talk Peter will give an overview of these projects, the significant progress they have made to date, and the work that remains to be done.


About the speaker: Peter Eckersley is Technology Projects Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He keeps his eyes peeled for technologies that, by accident or design, pose a risk to computer users' freedoms—and then looks for ways to fix them. He explains gadgets to lawyers, and lawyers to gadgets. Peter's work at EFF has included privacy and security projects such as Panopticlick, HTTPS Everywhere, SSDI, and the SSL Observatory; helping to launch a movement for open wireless networks; fighting to keep modern computing platforms open; and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols.

Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne; his research focused on the practicality and desirability of using alternative compensation systems to legalize P2P file sharing and similar distribution tools while still paying authors and artists for their work.

CISAC Conference Room

Peter Eckersley Technology Projects Director Speaker Electronic Frontier Foundation
Seminars
-

Peter will discuss work at SRI and the University of Cambridge under two projects currently funded by DARPA, relating to clean-slate architectures for hardware, software, networking, and clouds, aimed at higher-assurance security, resilience, evolvability, and other critical requirements.

Two papers provide some early views of the ongoing work:

http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/law10.pdf 
http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann/2012resolve-cheri.pdf


Peter G. Neumann (Neumann@CSL.sri.com) has doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt. After 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the 1960s, during which he was heavily involved in the Multics development jointly with MIT and Honeywell, he has been in SRI's Computer Science Lab since September 1971. He is concerned with computer systems and networks, trustworthiness/dependability, high assurance, security, reliability, survivability, safety, and many risks-related issues such as election-system integrity, crypto applications and policies, health care, social implications, and human needs -- especially those including privacy. He is currently PI on two DARPA projects: clean-slate trustworthy hosts for the CRASH program with new hardware and new software, and clean-slate networking for the Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds program. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, has been responsible for CACM's Inside Risks columns monthly from 1990 to 2007, tri-annually since then, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity (http://www.votingintegrity.org). He created ACM SIGSOFT's Software Engineering Notes in 1976, was its editor for 19 years, and still contributes the RISKS section. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Security and Privacy. He has participated in four studies for the National Academies of Science: Multilevel Data Management Security (1982), Computers at Risk (1991), Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society (1996), and Improving Cybersecurity for the 21st Century: Rationalizing the Agenda (2007). His 1995 book, Computer-Related Risks, is still timely. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS, and is also an SRI Fellow. He received the National Computer System Security Award in 2002 and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005. He is a member of the U.S. Government Accountability Office Executive Council on Information Management and Technology, and the California Office of Privacy Protection advisory council. In 2012, he was elected to the newly created National Cybersecurity Hall of Fame as one of the first set of inductees. He co-founded People For Internet Responsibility. He has taught courses at Darmstadt, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. See his website (http://www.csl.sri.com/neumann) for testimonies for the U.S. Senate and House and California state Senate and Legislature, papers, bibliography, further background, etc.

CISAC Conference Room

Peter Neumann Principal Scientist, SRI International Computer Science Lab Speaker
Seminars
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

CISAC scholars are putting Stanford at the center of research on cybersecurity and the future of the Internet, drawing on experts from across campus and around the globe. Privacy and Internet freedoms in countries whose government restrict the use of social media and Web browsing, as well as the use of information technologies by organized crime and individual hackers, are all topics driving the innovative work underway at CISAC. 

Leading the charge are CISAC's inaugural cybersecurity fellows: Jonathan Mayer, Andrew K. Woods, and Timothy Junio. In this interactive cartoon by political journalist Dan Archer, we are introduced to the fellows, their work, and what they believe are the most pressing issues facing us today. The cartoon includes links to audio, video and articles.

View Cartoon

 

Learn More About CISAC Fellowships

(Applications Due February 1)

All News button
1
-

CISAC Conference Room

Timothy Junio Cybersecurity Fellow Speaker CISAC
0
Affiliate
Diffie_Whit.jpg

Whitfield Diffie is a consulting scholar at CISAC. He was a visiting scholar in 2009-2010 and an affiliate from 2010-2012. He is best known for the discovery of the concept of public key cryptography, in 1975, which he developed along with Stanford University Electrical Engineering Professor Martin Hellman. Public key cryptography, which revolutionized not only cryptography but also the cryptographic community, now underlies the security of internet commerce.

During the 1980s, Diffie served as manager of secure systems research at Northern Telecom. In 1991, he joined Sun Microsystems as distinguished engineer and remained as Sun fellow and chief security officer until the spring of 2009.

Diffie spent the 1990s working to protect the individual and business right to use encryption, for which he argues in the book Privacy on the Line, the Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which he wrote jointly with Susan Landau. Diffie is a Marconi fellow and the recipient of a number of awards including the National Computer Systems Security Award (given jointly by NIST and NSA) and the Franklin Institute's Levy Prize.

Whitfield Diffie Affiliate Commentator CISAC
Seminars
Subscribe to Cybersecurity