Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University and founding director of the Tufts MS program in Cybersecurity and Public Policy. Landau works at the intersection of privacy, surveillance, national security law, and cybersecurity. She is the author of People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, and co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. Landau has testified before Congress, written for the Washington Post, Science, and Scientific American, and frequently appears on NPR and BBC. Landau has been a senior staff Privacy Analyst at Google, a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University. She is a recipient of various awards and fellowships; she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Lifetime Achievement Award by USENIX.

Susan Landau
Photo by Ben Barnhart

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  Biographical Information

Susan Landau is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at the The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University, founding director of the Tufts MS program in Cybersecurity and Public Policy and Senior Fellow at The Fletcher School Center for International Law and Governance. Landau works at the intersection of privacy, cybersecurity, and national security law. Landau has been a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She has also been a faculty member at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wesleyan University and held visiting positions at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. Landau spent many wonderful summers teaching at Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, a program for high-ability high school students (cf. Supporting a National Treasure and Will '17 be the Year of the Pig?).

During the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, Landau's insights on how government encryption policy skewed civil society and business needs for security helped win the argument for a relaxation of cryptographic export controls. Landau was an early voice in the argument that law-enforcement requirements for embedding surveillance within communication infrastructures created long-term national-security risks. Her position that securing private-sector telecommunications was in the national-security interest ran contrary to public thinking at the time and had strong impact on public policy. Landau's earlier work was in algebraic algorithms and symbolic computation; this included applications to cryptography.

Landau is the author of People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health, Listening In: Cybersecurity in an Insecure Age (which came about as a result of her Congressional testimony in the 2016 Apple/FBI case), Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, which won the 2012 Surveillance Studies Book Prize, and co-author, with Whitfield Diffie, of 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. Landau has testified before Congress and frequently briefed U.S. and European governments on encryption, surveillance, and cybersecurity issues. She has written for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Science, and Scientific American, and frequently appeared on NPR and BBC.

Landau is a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Division Committee of the Division of Engineering and Physical Science Committee, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Committee on International Security Studies, and the Center for Democracy and Technology Advisory Council. She has previously served on the National Academies Forum on Cyber Resilience and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and served on various Academies studies. Landau has been a member of the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and the Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency. She is area editor for political and policy perspectives for the Journal of Cybersecurity and contributing editor for Lawfare. She served as associate editor in chief and associate editor for IEEE Security and Privacy, section board member for the Communications of the ACM, and associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society from 1994-2001.

Landau is active in issues related to women in science. With Terry Benzel and Hilarie Orman, she organized security research meetings for women and members of underrepresented groups. Landau started researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers in academia, industry and government labs and with Elaine Weyuker, created the ACM Athena Lectureship, an award celebrating outstanding women researchers. In 2008 Landau co-chaired the MIT Celebration of Women in Math meeting. She has served on the executive committee of ACM-W and the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRAW).

She received the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, was a 2010-2011 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a 2012 Guggenheim fellow, was inducted into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame in 2015 and into the Information System Security Association Hall of Fame in 2018. Landau is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2023, with Steve Bellovin and Matt Blaze, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from USENIX . She received her BA from Princeton, her MS from Cornell, and her PhD from MIT.

 
     
 

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

Cryptography and Cryptography Policy

Contact-Tracing Apps, Privacy, and Equity

Privacy

Cybersecurity

Law and Public Policy

Identity Management

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

Blog Posts, Letters to the Editor, and Other Short Pieces on a Variety of Topics

Podcasts

Webinars

 
     
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Professional Activities (recent)

 
     
     
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Honors and Awards

 
   
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  Contact Information

 
 
For all Tufts-related activity:

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For any non-Tufts-related activities:

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