Steven M. Bellovin—Biography

Steven M. Bellovin is the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Center of the university's Data Science Institute, and an affiliate faculty member at Columbia Law School. Bellovin does research on security and privacy and on related public policy issues. In his copious spare professional time, he does some work on the history of technology. He joined the faculty in 2005 after many years at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs Research, where he was an AT&T Fellow. He received a BA degree from Columbia University, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While a graduate student, he helped create Netnews; for this, he and the other perpetrators, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, were given the 1995 Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award (The Flame). In 2023, he received a second Flame award (still in the same lifetime!), along with Matt Blaze and Susan Landau, for public policy work on computer security and privacy. He has also received the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and has been elected to the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame. Bellovin has served as Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission and as the Technology Scholar at the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In the past, he has been a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Advisory Committee, and the Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the Election Assistance Commission.

Bellovin is the author of Thinking Security and the co-author of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, and holds a number of patents on cryptographic and network protocols. He has served on many National Academies study committees, including those on information systems trustworthiness, the privacy implications of authentication technologies, and cybersecurity research needs; he was also a member of the information technology subcommittee of an NRC study group on science versus terrorism. He was a member of the Internet Architecture Board from 1996-2002; he was co-director of the Security Area of the IETF from 2002 through 2004.

More details may be found at https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/informal-bio.html; much of my technical history is here.