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Welcome to Simson Garfinkel's web site.

Simson L. Garfinkel is the Chief of the Center for Disclosure Avoidance Research at the US Census Bureau. 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

• 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.

I also have a bio slideset available.

See also my Presentations Archive

Recent publications

Academic

• Garfinkel, Simson, Michael McCarrin, Hash-Based Carving: Searching media for complete files and fragments with sector hashing and hashdb, DFRWS 2015, Philadelphia, PA.
• Garfinkel, Simson, Nicole Beebe, Lishu Liu, and Michele Maasberg, Detecting Threatening Insiders with Lightweight Media Forensics, IEEE Technologies for Homeland Security (HST 2013), Nov 12-14, Waltham, MA. 2013
• Rowe, Neil, Schwamm, Riqui, Garfinkel, Simson. Language Translation for File Paths, DFRWS 2013, Aug 4-7, 2013. Monterey, CA. BEST PAPER AWARD.
• Garfinkel, Simson L., Digital Forensics, American Scientist, September-October 2013
• Young J., Foster, K., Garfinkel, S., and Fairbanks, K., Distinct Sector Hashes for Target File Detection, IEEE Computer, December 2012

Journalistic

• Glass, Darkly: For its wearable computer to be accepted, Google must convince people that the device isn’t creepy., Technology Review, February 17, 2014
• Windows 8: Design over Usability, Technology Review, February 20, 2013
• How to Delete Regrettable Posts from the Internet, Technology Review, October 30, 2012.

Current projects Software and systems Detecting Threatening Insiders with Lightweight Media Forensics, a DHS-sponsored research project Digitally Signed Do-Not-Reply Email tcpflow, a TCP/IP session reassembler bulk_extractor, a high-speed feature extractor Digital Forensics XML The Forensics Wiki, founder and maintainer Writing MIT Technology Review, guest contributor Computers & Security, Associate Editor Technical Privacy Auditing with computer forensics tools You may also be interested in my Future Projects Completed projects 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 Citeulike Profile ForensicsWiki User Page Wikipedia Article on Simson Garfinkel Amazon.com Listmania! Lists