Susan Landau

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Susan Landau is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Harvard University, where she works on cybersecurity policy issues. In 2010-2011, Landau was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, while from 1999-2010 she was at Sun Microsystems, most recently as Distinguished Engineer. Before joining Sun, Landau taught at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University and conducted research in algebraic algorithms. Landau's book, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies was recently published by MIT Press; she is also co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of the 1998 Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Landau testified in 2011 for the House Judiciary Committee on security risks in wiretapping, while in 2009 she testified for the House Science Committee on Cybersecurity Activities at NIST's Information Technology Laboratory. Landau serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council and on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award. She is a fellow both of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery.

 
     
 

MIT Press
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MIT Press
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  Biographical Information

Susan Landau is a Visiting Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Harvard University. In 2010-2011, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her book Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies was recently published by MIT Press. Landau was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems from 1999-2010; there she concentrated on the interplay between security and public policy. Her activities included surveillance issues, digital rights management, where she helped establish Sun's stance on DRM, privacy and security issues in federated identity management, and work on cryptography and export control. Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. She also spent many summers teaching at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, a program for high-ability high school students (cf. Supporting a National Treasure).

Landau's early work in algebraic algorithms included a number of polynomial-time algorithms to problems previously known only to have exponential-time solutions; this work had applications to symbolic computation, cryptography, and computational geometry. During the 1990s Crypto Wars and the battle over cryptographic export control, Landau shifted her interest to policy issues. Landau and Whitfield Diffie wrote Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which won the 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award, and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession (revised edition, 2007). Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy.''

In recent years Landau has focused on the security risks of embedding surveillance within communications infrastructures. She has briefed members of the U.S. and European governments, written numerous articles on the issues, including for the Washington Post, Scientific American, the Chicago Tribune, and the Christian Science Monitor, and participated in several industry reports on the issue. She has also appeared on NPR a number of times (including on All Things Considered, On the Media, and Talk of the Nation), and has published in a number of venues, including IEEE Security and Privacy, Communications of the ACM, National Security Journal, Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, as well as in technical conferences and workshops. With Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos, Landau helped establish Sun's principles on digital-rights management, including ``All creators are users, and many users are creators,'' and ``Respect for users' privacy is essential.'' Sun's DRM project, DReaM, provided support for fair use, the only DRM system to do so. Landau also worked on privacy and security aspects of the Liberty Alliance federated identity management system.

Landau serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council and on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. She also is an associate editor for IEEE Security and Privacy and a section board member of Communications of the ACM. She served for six years on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board and on the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency, established by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition, she was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's Advisory Committee on Privacy and Security and ACM's Committee on Law and Computing Technology, as well as an associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Landau is active in issues related to women in science. She started researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers in academia, industry and government labs and with Elaine Weyuker, created the ACM-W Athena Lectureship, an award celebrating outstanding women researchers. In 2008 Landau co-chaired the MIT Celebration of Women in Math meeting. She serves on the executive committee of ACM-W and was a member of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRAW) from 2003-2010.

Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Computing Machinery. She received her PhD from MIT (1983), her MS from Cornell (1979), and her BA from Princeton (1976).

 
   
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  Publications
(Publications are arranged by subject and may be listed in more than one category if appropriate.)
 
     
 

Cybersecurity

Cryptography

Privacy

Identity Management and Project Liberty

Digital Rights Management

Symbolic Computation

  • S. Landau, "Computations with Algebraic Numbers," in J. Grabmeier, E. Kaltofen, and V. Weispfennig (eds.), Computer Algebra Handbook, Spring Verlag, 2003, pp. 18-19.
  • S. Landau and N. Immerman, Embedding Linkages in Integer Lattices, Algorithmica, Vol. 43, No. 5, May 2000, pp. 115-120. A preliminary version appeared in MSI Workshop on Computational Geometry, October, 1994.
  • S. Landau, Compute and Conjecture, Commentary (In My Opinion), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Feb. 1999, p. 189.
  • S. Landau, : Four Different Views, Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 1998), pp. 55-60.
  • D. Kozen, S. Landau, and R. Zippel, Decomposition of Algebraic Functions, Journal of Symbolic Computation, Vol. 22 (1996), pp. 235-246. A preliminary version appeared in Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (1994).
  • S. Landau, How to Tangle with a Nested Radical, Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 49-55.
  • S. Landau, Finding Maximal Subfields, SIGSAM Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1993), pp. 4-8.
  • S. Landau, Simplification of Nested Radicals, SIAM J. of Comput., Vol. 21 (1992), pp. 85-110. A preliminary version appeared in Thirtieth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1989), pp. 314-319.
  • S. Landau, A Note on `Zippel Denesting,' J. Symb. Comput., Vol. 13 (1992), pp. 41-47.
  • J. Cremona and S. Landau, Shrinking Lattice Polyhedra, SIAM J. of Discrete Math, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1990), pp. 338-348. A preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of the First ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (1990), pp. 188-193.
  • D. Kozen and S. Landau, Polynomial Decomposition Algorithms, J. Symb. Comput., Vol. 7 (1989), pp. 445-456. Appeared in a different version as J. von zur Gathen, D. Kozen and S. Landau, "Functional Decomposition of Polynomials" Twenty-Eight Annual IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (1989), pp. 314-319.
  • S. Landau, Factoring Polynomials Quickly, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, [Special Article Series], vol. 34, No. 1 (1987), pp. 3-8.
  • S. Landau and G. Miller, Solvability by Radicals is in Polynomial Time, J. Comput. Sys. Sci., Vol. 30, No. 2 (1985), pp. 179-208. A preliminary version appeared in Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (1983), pp. 140-151.
  • S. Landau, Factoring Polynomials over Algebraic Number Fields, SIAM J. of Comput., Vol. 14, No. 1 (1985), pp. 184-195.
  • S. Landau, "Polynomial Time Algorithms for Galois Groups, Proceedings of the Int'l. Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (1984), Spring Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 174, pp. 225-236.

Complexity

  • N. Immerman and S. Landau, The Complexity of Iterated Multiplication, Information and Computation Vol. 116, No. 1 (1995), pp. 103-116. A preliminary version appeared in Fourth Annual Structure in Complexity Conference (1989), pp. 104-111.
  • S. Landau and N. Immerman, The Similarities (and Differences) between Polynomials and Integers, Int'l. Conf. on Number Theoretic and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science (1993), pp. 57-59.

Women in Science

Miscellaneous

 
     
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Professional Activities (recent)

 
     
     
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Honors and Awards

  • Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, 2011.
  • Women of Vision Social Impact Award, Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, 2008.
  • Distinguished Engineer, Association for Computing Machinery, 2006.
  • Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2000.
  • with Whitfield Diffie, IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession, 1999.
  • with Whitfield Diffie, McGannon Book Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy Research, Donald McGannon Communication Research Center (Fordham University), 1998.
  • NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1988-1991.
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    Contact Information

    Phone: 413-259-2018

     
         
         
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