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Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel is the US Census Bureau's Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access and the Chair of the Bureau's Disclosure Review Board. His current research interests include privacy in big data, cybersecurity and usability. He has previously worked in digital forensics, digital information management, medical imaging, and counter-terrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent tutorials and presentations

Note: talks with the same name may (and frequently do) have different slides

• 2018-03-08 Challenges and Experiences Adapting Differentially Private Mechanisms to the 2020 Census
• 2018-02-20 Protecting Data Sources, presented at the 4th Kavli Conference on Science Journalism, Austin, TX.
• 2018-02-14 Modernizing the Disclosure Avoidance System for the 2020 Census, presented at Georgetown University
• 2017-12-11 Federal Privacy Day Presentation on De-ID
• 2017-09-15 Modernizing the Disclosure Avoidance System for the 2020 Census, presented to the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC). [slides]
• 2017-09-14 Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability, a USACM panel at the National Press Club. Also available on Facebook Live, with the video starting at 10:45.
• 2016-12-14 The Cybersecurity Mess
• 2015-08-12 Hash Based Carving: Searching media for complete files and fragments with sector hashing and hashdb, DFRWS 2015, Philadelphia, PA.
• 2014-02-22 Digital Forensics Innovation: Searching A Terabyte of Data in 10 minutes Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
• 2014-02-18 Can we Sniff (Wi-Fi)? Implications of Joffe v. Google for security researchers and educators, New York University, NY.

See also my Presentations Archive and my AWS Tutorial.

Recent publications

• Pridgen, Adam, Simson Garfinkel and Dan Dan Wallach, Present but Unreachable, reducing persistent latent secrets in HotSpot JVM, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50), Jan 4-7, 2017, Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii. slides BEST PAPER AWARD
• Theofanos, Mary, Simson Garfinkel, and Yee-Yin Choong, Secure and Usable Enterprise Authentication: Lessons from the Field, IEEE Security and Privacy, September/October 2016.
• Garfinkel, Simson, Michael McCarrin, Hash-Based Carving: Searching media for complete files and fragments with sector hashing and hashdb, DFRWS 2015, Philadelphia, PA.

Current projects Software and systems Toying around with Internet of Things things Writing Computers & Security, Associate Editor You may also be interested in my Future Projects Completed projects tcpflow, a TCP/IP session reassembler (2006--2014) bulk_extractor, a high-speed feature extractor (2006--2014) Digital Forensics XML (2005--2012) The Forensics Wiki, founder and maintainer (2005--2014) SBook5, a free-format address book for MacOS. (1991--2006) AFF, The Advanced Forensic Format (for storing digital evidence) Agenda, an early conference scheduling app for PalmOS. (2001) Print your own notepaper (2003, but it still works!) Updated MediaWiki BibText Extension (2007) NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991--1993) 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, Virtual Tour (1995) docx_steg Tools for hiding information in docx files and printing their contents (2008) Resources For Students Current Toolset -- The tools that I use in my research Open Source Computer Science Books -- A good list Mac Resources LaTeX Resources Python Resources Web Resources Windows Resources XML Resources Student Resources SEED: Developing Instructional Laboratories for Computer SEcurity EDucation Where to find me online Articles in Technology Review ACM Digital Library Author Profile Or just click: Official ACM Publications DBLP Profile LinkedIn Profile csauthors.net (my Dijkstra number is three) Google Scholar Citeulike Profile ForensicsWiki User Page Wikipedia Article on Simson Garfinkel Amazon.com Listmania! Lists ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1294-2831 Mendeley