Simson L. Garfinkel joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersberg, Maryland, in January 2015 as Senior Advisor, Information Access Division. His current research includes privacy and data de-identification.Garfinkel was formerly an Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California from 2006 to January 2015. He lives in Arlington, VA
Dr. Garfinkel has research interests in computer forensics, the emerging field of usability and security, and in personal information management. He is also interested in information policy and terrorism, and has published in these areas since the late 1980s.
In addition to his work as an academic, Garfinkel is a contributing editor at Technology Review Magazine, where he writes a weekly blog on emerging technology, and an editor-at-large at CSO Magazine, where he writes the award-winning monthly column "Machine Shop." In the past Garfinkel was a weekly contributor to The Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury News and The Christian Science Monitor He was a founding contributor of Wired Magazine. Overall, Garfinkel's popular articles have appeared in more than 70 publications around the world.
Garfinkel is the author or co-author of fourteen books on computing. He is perhaps best known for his book Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. Garfinkel's most successful book, Practical UNIX and Internet Security (co-authored with Gene Spafford), has sold more than 250,000 copies in more than a dozen languages since the first edition was published in 1991.
Garfinkel received three Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT in 1987, a Master's of Science in Journalism from Columbia University in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2005.
Garfinkel's home page is https://simson.net/page/Main_Page.
Forensics
Simson L. Garfinkel is the author of the following forensic tools:
On the MediaWiki version of Forensics Wiki, Garfinkel was known as simsong.