Bio

(written in third-person, because that's how it's done :)

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, received tenure in 2006 and was promoted to full in 2011. Focusing on how to build trustworthy systems in the real world, his research explores technical topics ranging from hardware and operating systems to ethnography and human behavior, in application domains including finance, healthcare, and energy.

Many of his courses have been named "favorite classes" by graduating seniors.

His latest book The Internet of Risky Things (O'Reilly, 2017) examines the scary future humanity faces. His earlier book The Craft of System Security (Addison-Wesley, 2007) resulted from the educational journey (and he wishes Addison-Wesley would let him put out a revised edition); his earliest book Trusted Computing Platforms: Design and Applications (Springer, 2005) provides a deeper presentation of his research journey in security hardware.

Sean has published over one hundred refereed papers; been granted over a dozen patents; and advised over three dozen Ph.D., M.S., and senior honors theses. He and his students have won several "Best Paper" awards.

Sean was educated at Princeton and CMU, and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.

Back to Sean's Home Page

Maintained by Sean Smith, sws@cs.dartmouth.edu