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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. His research interests include digital forensics; digital artifact management, with special attention to the curation of "born digital" artifacts; privacy; the use of human subjects in computer security research; usable security, and terrorism. (Read full bio.)

Recent tutorials and presentations

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

• 2014-03-26 The Cybersecurity Mess, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, MA
• 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.
• 2013-12-16 Lessons learned managing a 60TB digital evidence corpus and writing digital forensics tools., University of Maryland, College Park (iSchool).
• 2013-12-06 Finding privacy leaks and stolen data with bulk data analysis and optimistic decoding, University of Maryland Baltimore County.
• 2013-12-05 tcpflow and bulk_extractor update
• 2013-11-13 Finding threatening insiders with lightweight media forensics, IEEE HST 2013 paper
• 2013-11-05 Forensic Visualization with Open Source Tools, Open Source Forensics Conference.
• 2013-10-16 Finding privacy leaks and stolen data with bulk data analysis and optimistic decoding, University of Maryland, College Park (CS Dept.)
• 2013-10-10 Digital Forensics Overview, Bryn Mawr College
• 2013-05-17 The Cybersecurity Mess, MIT Club of DC
• 2013-02-22 Bulk Data Analysis With Optimistic Decompression.

See also my Presentations Archive

Recent publications

Academic

• 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

• 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 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