Dan Wallach: Security Watchdog for the Industry

Computerworld -

Dan Wallach doesnt shy away from a good fight  especially when it comes to exposing security flaws in important technologies that affect the public. When most academic researchers steer away from controversy, Wallach steps up.

As a security researcher, Wallach, 35, has unearthed problems in proposed digital music security initiatives and electronic voting systems, leading to a few run-ins with corporate lawyers.

Im not a hacker, insists Wallach, a tenured associate professor at Rice University. Im shining the bright light of scientific inquiry on very public IT issues.

Wallach began his career as a graduate student at Princeton University, where he discovered security flaws in Sun Microsystems Inc.s Java technology. As an intern at Netscape for two summers, he helped design the basic security architecture now used for Java, JavaScript and C# across the Web.

Before moving to Rice, he published papers on a variety of research topics. In one paper, a critical analysis of the Secure Digital Music Initiative, he found that all of the proposed SDMI systems were easily broken. In another, Wallach and his team analyzed Diebolds electronic voting system and found that it had similarly glaring security flaws. The SDMI consortium and Diebold both threatened to sue but eventually backed down. Wallach says he had the scientific evidence to back up his claims.

Dan has a lot of guts and is willing to do things that matter to people, says Ed Felten, Wallachs adviser at Prince­ton. That sometimes gets lawyers and powerful people involved. But hes willing to navigate those challenges to get the work done.

Currently on sabbatical from Rice, Wallach is focusing on voting security as associate director of ACCURATE, a $7.5 million research center. Explaining why hes involved in that effort, he says, Its hard for me to think of anything more important [to work on] than our democracy.

Collett is a Computerworld contributing writer. Contact her at stcollett@aol.com.

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