Sean W Smith

Biography

"Prof. Sean Smith has been working in information security attacks and defenses, for industry and government since before there was a Web. In graduate school, he worked with the US Postal Inspection Service on postal meter fraud; as a post-doc and staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he performed security reviews, designs, analyses, and briefings for a wide variety of public-sector clients; at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, he designed the security architecture for (and helped code and test) the IBM 4758 secure coprocessor, and then led the formal modeling and verification work that earned it the world's first FIPS 140-1 Level 4 security validation. In July 2000, Sean left IBM for Dartmouth, since he was convinced that the academic education and research environment is a better venue for changing the world. His current work, as PI of the Dartmouth Trust Lab and Director of Dartmouth's Institute for Security, Technology, and Society, investigates how to build trustworthy systems in the real world. At Dartmouth, many of his courses have been named ""favorite classes"" by graduating seniors. His book Trusted Computing Platforms: Design and Applications (Springer, 2005) provides a deeper presentation of his research journey in security hardware; his book The Craft of System Security (Addison-Wesley, 2007) resulted from the educational journey."

Research Interest

Security and privacy in real-world systems, including power, health, finance, and the Internet of Things