Susan Landau

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Susan Landau
Susan Landau (cropped).jpg
Landau in 2022
Born1954 (age 7071)
Alma mater
Scientific career
Fields Engineering, Cyber Security; Cryptography

Susan Landau (born 1954) is an American mathematician, engineer, cybersecurity policy expert, and Bridge Professor in Cybersecurity and Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. [2] [3] She previously worked as a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google. [4] She was a Guggenheim Fellow [5] and a visiting scholar at the Computer Science Department, Harvard University in 2012. [6]

Contents

Career

Landau is an alumna of Bronx Science. She then graduated with an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1976 after completing a senior thesis titled "Simple algebras", under the supervision of John Coleman Moore. [7] She went on to receive a master's degree from Cornell University in 1979 before pursuing graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "On computing Galois groups and its application to solvability by radicals", under the supervision of Gary L. Miller. [2] [8]

In 2010–2011, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where she investigated issues involving security of government systems, and their privacy and policy implications. [9]

From 1999 until 2010, she specialized in internet security at Sun Microsystems. [10]

In 1989, she introduced the first algorithm for deciding which nested radicals can be denested, which is known as Landau's algorithm. [11]

In 1972, her project on odd perfect numbers won a finalist position in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. [12] Outside of her technical work, she is interested in the issues of women in science, maintaining the ResearcHers Email list, a "community dedicated to supporting women new to research in computing", [13] and an online bibliography of women's writing in computer science. [14] She was awarded the 2008 Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact. [15] [16] She has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1999, [17] and in 2011 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. [18] In 2012, Landau won the Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize for her book Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies , published by MIT Press. In October 2015, Landau was inducted into the National Cyber Security Hall of Fame. [19]

Involvement with FBI v. Apple case

Landau gave testimony in the FBI–Apple encryption dispute between 2015 and 2016. [20] She is the co-author of “Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications,” which received the 2015 J. D. Falk Award from the Messaging Malware Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group. The Obama administration gave substantial credit to this report's analysis when it announced that it would not pursue exceptional access to phone data. [21]

Landau testified that making iPhones less secure would simply send terrorists and bad actors running toward options that the FBI and Congress had no control over. Compelling Apple to weaken its software would "weaken us, but not impact the bad guys." [22]

Notes

  1. Contemporary authors: a bio-bibliographical guide to current writers in fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, journalism, drama, motion pictures, television and other fields, Gale Research Co., 1998, p. 195.
  2. 1 2 "Susan Landau" . Retrieved April 15, 2018. and "Security and Conflict Resolution: Susan Landau" . Retrieved April 15, 2018.
  3. "Cybersecurity Bill Would Shift Power Away From NSA". Yahoo! News . Retrieved August 28, 2017.
  4. "Susan Landau Biography". PrivacyInk. Retrieved September 6, 2013.
  5. "List of Guggenheim Fellowships awarded in 2012". Archived from the original on August 16, 2012. Retrieved September 6, 2013.
  6. Susan Landau at LinkedIn
  7. Landau, Susan (1976). Simple algebras. Princeton, NJ: Department of Mathematics.
  8. Landau, Susan. "On computing Galois groups and its application to solvability by radicals". library.mit.edu. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
  9. "Susan Landau – Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study". Harvard University. Archived from the original on November 27, 2010. Retrieved January 9, 2011.
  10. "Susan Landau". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on October 10, 2008. Retrieved September 14, 2008.
  11. S. Landau, "Simplification of Nested Radicals", SIAM Journal of Computation, volume 21 (1992), pages 85–110.
  12. "Susan Landau: Toward Perfect Internet Security". Scientific American. September 2, 2008. Retrieved September 14, 2008.
  13. "ResearcHers Email List". Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  14. "The Book List: Computer Science Books by Women Computer Scientists". Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. Archived from the original on September 15, 2008. Retrieved September 14, 2008.
  15. "Women of Vision awards presented at Anita Borg Institute banquet". Diversity/Careers. August–September 2008. Archived from the original on September 28, 2011. Retrieved June 29, 2011.
  16. AnitaB_org (May 30, 2008), Susan Landau, Women of Vision Winner Social Impact , retrieved May 22, 2018
  17. "AAAS Fellow / Susan Landau". American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  18. "ACM: Fellows Award / Susan Landau". Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on July 22, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2013.
  19. "Keep smartphones backdoor free, urges cybersecurity expert Susan Landau". Tech Republic. July 12, 2016. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  20. "Keep smartphones backdoor free, urges cybersecurity expert Susan Landau". Tech Republic. July 12, 2016. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  21. "Susan Landau, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy, to be Inducted into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame". Worcester Polytechnic Institute. October 26, 2015. Retrieved August 27, 2017.
  22. "Apple and FBI Take Their iPhone Hacking Fight to Congress". Wired. March 1, 2016.

References