Simson Garfinkel

Simson Garfinkel

Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Garfinkel is regarded as a leader in the fields of Digital forensics and Usable Security. In addition to his academic work, Garfinkel is a journalist, an entrepreneur, and an inventor, his work in all three concerned with computer security, privacy and information technology.

Garfinkel is the author or co-author of 14 books and the author of more than a thousand articles. He is a contributing writer for Technology Review and has written as a freelancer for many publications including Wired magazine, The Boston Globe, Privacy Journal and CSO Magazine. His work for CSO Magazine earned him five regional and national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Awards in 2003 and 2004.

As an entrepreneur Garfinkel founded Vineyard.NET, an Internet service provider on Martha's Vineyard, and Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that develops advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Garfinkel holds six patents, mostly in the field of computer security.

Garfinkel obtained three S.B. degrees from MIT in 1987; a M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 1988; and a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in 2005. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University from September 2005 through August 2008. In 2012 he was named a Fellow of the ACM. Today Garfinkel lives in Arlington, VA.