Ross J. Anderson

Research and career

Anderson was appointed a lecturer at Cambridge in 1995. In addition to teaching at the University of Cambridge, he also taught at the University of Edinburgh.

Anderson's research interests were in security, cryptology, dependability and technology policy. In cryptography, he designed with Eli Biham the BEAR, LION and Tiger cryptographic primitives, and co-wrote with Biham and Lars Knudsen the block cipher Serpent, one of the finalists in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition. He also discovered weaknesses in the FISH cipher and designed the stream cipher Pike.

Anderson always campaigned for computer security to be studied in a wider social context. Many of his writings emphasised the human, social, and political dimension of security. On online voting, for example, he wrote "When you move from voting in person to voting at home (whether by post, by phone or over the Internet) it vastly expands the scope for vote buying and coercion", making the point that it's not just a question of whether the encryption can be cracked.

In 1998, Anderson founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a think tank and lobbying group on information-technology policy.

Anderson was also a founder of the UK-Crypto mailing list and the economics of security research field.

Anderson was well known among Cambridge academics as an outspoken defender of academic freedoms, intellectual property and other matters of university politics. He was engaged in the "Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms" and had been an elected member of Cambridge University Council since 2002. In January 2004, the student newspaper Varsity declared Anderson to be Cambridge University's "most powerful person".

In 2002, he became an outspoken critic of trusted computing proposals, in particular Microsoft's Palladium operating system vision. However, Anderson's FAQ document attempting to explain trusted computing and its implications has been characterised by IBM TC researcher David R. Safford as "full of technical errors" and of "presenting speculation as fact."

For years Anderson argued that by their nature large databases will never be free of abuse by breaches of security. He said that if a large system is designed for ease of access it becomes insecure; if made watertight it becomes impossible to use. This is sometimes known as Anderson's Rule.

Anderson was the author of several editions of Security Engineering, which was initially published by Wiley in 2001. He was the founder and editor of Computer and Communications Security Reviews.

After Edward Snowden's vast global surveillance disclosures in June 2013, Anderson suggested one way to begin stamping out the British state's unaccountable involvement in this NSA spying scandal was to entirely end the domestic secret services: "Were I a legislator, I would simply abolish MI5". Anderson noted the only way this kind of systemic data collection was made possible was through the business models of private industry. The value of information-driven Web companies such as Facebook and Google is built around their ability to gather vast tracts of data. It was something the intelligence agencies would have struggled to do alone.

Anderson was a critic of smart meters, writing that there are various privacy and energy security concerns.

Personal life and death

Anderson met his wife, Shireen, while he was working in Johannesburg and they were married in Cambridge in 1992. Shireen Anderson is the coordinator of the Christina Kelly Association, of Churchill College, Cambridge. They have one daughter, Bavani, and four grandchildren.

Anderson died unexpectedly at home with his family in Cambridge on 28 March 2024, at the age of 67.

Security Engineering

By agreement with the publisher , the third edition of Ross Anderson's book Security Engineering was made available for download at the Cambridge University archive in November 2024.