Main Page

Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel is an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. 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

• 2011-07-20 Working with Computer Forensics Data, presented at SOUPS 2011.
• 2011-07-14 Introduction to Computer Forensics and Android Forensics (with an emphasis on computer forensics)
• 2011-06-14 bulk_extractor overview, Presented at the Sleuth Kit and Open Source Digital Forensics Conference 2011.
• Overview of media forensics research

See also my Presentations Archive

Working Papers

Here are working and draft papers relevant to some of the topics in my talks:

• Digital Forensics XML (working paper)
• bulk_extractor (working paper)

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 Data Fusion Aligning Security and Usability You can find a complete list of my research on my Research page.

Teaching Most recently I taught: 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 Developing Open Source Computer Forensics Software, including bulk_extractor, fiwalk, and the Digital Forensics XML Project. The Forensics Wiki. I founded this wiki, monitor it, and occasionally contribute. I regularly contribute to MIT's Technology Review. You may also be interested in my Future Projects, especially if you are looking for ideas.

Completed Projects NeXTWORLD Magazine (1991--1993) SBook5, a free-format address book for MacOS. (1991--2006) 10 Spring Street, Vineyard Haven, Virtual Tour (1995) Agenda, an early conference scheduling app for PalmOS. (2001) Stream, an opportunistic encryption proxy. (2003) Print your own notepaper (2003, but it still works!) Updated MediaWiki BibText Extension (2007) docx_steg Tools for hiding information in docx files and printing their contents (2008)

Useful Resources Current Toolset -- The tools that I use in my research Open Source Computer Science Books -- A good list 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 Or just click: Official ACM Publications DBLP 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