Ian Goldberg just wants to give the good guys a fighting chance. “The bad guys have always had the latest and greatest computer security and privacy tools. But ordinary people don’t,” says Prof. Goldberg, who joins the SCS as a founding member of a new research group dubbed CrySP, which stands for Cryptography, Security and Privacy, and as a member of the well-established Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR) and the Networks and Distributed Systems Group.
Goldberg did his undergraduate work at Waterloo, and went on to complete his PhD at Berkeley before returning to Canada in 2000 to join tech company Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Radialpoint). One of the company’s original products was a commercialization of his PhD thesis, and enabled users to surf the Internet without revealing any personal information—such as identity, e-mail address, or computer address—to any third party, including Zero-Knowledge itself. He has also developed Off-the-Record Messaging, software which ensures that users’ instant messages cannot be observed or modified in transit, and that users are assured of speaking only to one another. Interestingly, even though users are assured of the identities of their buddies during a conversation, later on, they can deny that they were in the conversation at all. This tool has been built into Adium X, a popular instant messaging application for Apple’s OS X operating systems, and is available as a free plug-in for GAIM, a multi-protocol instant messaging client, and others. He is now excited about refining a privacy research testbed called Tor, which redirects users’ web requests through a series of servers so that no third parties can collect any identity information.
He is pleased to be back at Waterloo, working with some of the best cryptographic researchers in Canada. “It’s a rapidly growing school that’s attracting some great people. And Waterloo is a great city. You’re within driving distance of three Great Lakes! What more could you want?”
2006 Oct 04
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel: 519-888-4567 x33293
Fax: 519-885-1208
Contact | Feedback: cs-webmaster@cs.uwaterloo.ca | David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science | Faculty of Mathematics
Last modified: Tuesday, 24-Oct-2006 09:58:35 EDT
