The Internet of Risky Things: Trusting the Devices That Surround Us

Professor 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 this research journey; his book The Craft of System Security (Addison-Wesley, 2007) resulted from the educational journey.

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.