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Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests include computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, personal information management, privacy, information policy and terrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent and Upcoming Tutorials and Presentations

• March 8, 2010 Fast Disk Analysis with Random Sampling
• January 28, 2010 Automated Digital Forensics and Media Exploitation (Slides)

Recent Publications

You may find these articles interesting:

Academic

• M. I. Cohen, Simson Garfinkel and Bradley Schatz, Extending the Advanced Forensic Format to accommodate Multiple Data Sources, Logical Evidence, Arbitrary Information and Forensic Workflow, (accepted to DFRWS 2009)
• Garfinkel, Farrell, Roussev and Dinolt, Bringing Science to Digital Forensics with Standardized Forensic Corpora (accepted to DFRWS 2009)
• Vassil Roussev and Simson L. Garfinkel, File Fragment Classification—The Case for Specialized Approaches, Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering 2009, Oakland, CA (acceptance rate 30%)
• Automating Disk Forensic Processing with SleuthKit, XML and Python Systematic Approaches to Digital Forensics Engineering 2009, Oakland, CA (acceptance rate 30%)
• Finding and Archiving the Internet Footprint, invited paper, presented at the First Digital Lives Research Conference: Personal Digital Archives for the 21st Century, London, England, 9--11 February 2009.
• Garfinkel, S., Providing Cryptographic Security and Evidentiary Chain-of-Custody with the Advanced Forensic Format, Library, and Tools The International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics, Volume 1, Issue 1, January-March 2009.

Journalistic

• Privacy Requires Security, Not Abstinence; Protecting an inalienable right in the age of Facebook, Technology Review Magazine, July/August 2009
• Light, but not Leightweights: Netbooks are more than just cheap laptops, Technology Review, May/June 2009.

Current Research Automated Computer Forensics Sub-Linear Drive Analysis The Real Data Corpus: Building an unclassified research corpora of disk images from around the world. Human Subject Data and computer security research Aligning Security and Usability Data Fusion You can find a complete list of my research on my Research page.

Current Teaching Fall 2010 - CS4920 - Automated Computer Forensics Summer 2011 - CS3636 - Data Fusion with Online Information You may also be interested in the complete list of courses I have taught.

Current Projects The Advanced Forensics Format (AFF), a new format for storing images of magnetic and electronic digital media. The Forensics Wiki. I founded this wiki, monitor it, and occasionally contribute. Pervasive Signed Email. Now that roughly 90% of all Internet users have S/MIME-compliant mail programs, its time for companies like PayPal and Amazon to be sending out digitally signed mail as a matter of course. It would help in the fight against both spam and phishing. How can we get them to do it? Read the CHI 2005 paper. I am the program co-chair for the 2009 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security You may also be interested in my Future Projects

Completed Projects Print your own notepaper NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991--1993) SBook5, a free-format address book for MacOS. (1991--2006) 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, Virtual Tour (1995) Agenda, the conference scheduling app for PalmOS. (2001) Notepaper Generator. Print your own notebook paper! (2003) Stream, an opportunistic encryption proxy. (2003)

Useful Resources Current Toolset -- The tools that I use in my research How to search the computer science literature Mac Resources LaTeX Resources Python Resources Web Resources Windows Resources XML Resources

Where to find me online ACM Digital Library Author Profile LinkedIn Profile Citeulike Profile ForensicsWiki User Page Wikipedia Article on Simson Garfinkel

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Other sites of interest

• http://ex.nitroba.org --- All that's left of Deus Ex Machina Software now that we sold the ex.com domain.
• http://dmr.nitroba.org --- Donald M. Rosenbergs online site (his papers are at the Michigan State University Archives).
• http://realworlddocs.com --- My fathers newly published book on document drafting.
• http://forensicwiki.org --- Wiki for computer forensics