Ross J. Anderson - Research

Research

Anderson's research interests are in computer security. In cryptography, he designed with Eli Biham the BEAR, LION and Tiger cryptographic primitives, and coauthored with Biham and Lars Knudsen the block cipher Serpent, one of the finalists in the AES competition. He has also discovered weaknesses in the FISH cipher and designed the stream cipher Pike.

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

Anderson is also a founder of the UK-Crypto mailing list and the economics of security research domain.

He is well-known among Cambridge academics as an outspoken defender of academic freedoms, intellectual property, and other matters of university politics. He is engaged in the Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms and has been an elected member of Cambridge University Council since 2002. In January 2004, the student newspaper Varsity declared Anderson to be Cambridge University’s “most powerful person”.

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

Anderson's TCPA FAQ has been characterized by IBM TC researcher David Safford as "full of technical errors" and of "presenting speculation as fact."

For years Anderson has been arguing that by their nature large databases will never be free of abuse by breaches of security. He has 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.

Anderson is the author of Security Engineering, published by Wiley in 2001, ISBN 0-471-38922-6. He was the founder and editor of Computer and Communications Security Reviews.