Edward Felten facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Edward William Felten
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Edward Felten in 2019
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| Born | March 25, 1963 |
| Citizenship | American |
| Education | California Institute of Technology (BS) University of Washington (MS, PhD) |
| Known for | Secure Digital Music Initiative |
| Awards | EFF Pioneer Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science public affairs |
| Institutions | Princeton University, Federal Trade Commission |
| Doctoral advisor | Edward D. Lazowska and John Zahorjan |
Edward William Felten (born March 25, 1963) is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he was also the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy from 2007 to 2015 and from 2017 to 2019. On November 4, 2010, he was named Chief Technologist for the Federal Trade Commission, a position he officially assumed January 3, 2011. On May 11, 2015, he was named the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer. In 2018, he was nominated to and began a term as Board Member of PCLOB. Felten retired from Princeton University on July 1, 2021.
Felten has done a variety of computer security research, including groundbreaking work on proof-carrying authentication and work on security related to the Java programming language, but he is perhaps best known for his paper on the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) challenge.
Biography
Felten attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in physics in 1985. He worked as a staff programmer at Caltech from 1986 to 1989 on a parallel supercomputer project at Caltech. He then enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at the University of Washington. He was awarded a Master of Science degree in 1991 and a Ph.D. in 1993. His Ph.D. thesis was on developing an automated protocol for communication between parallel processors.
In 1993, he joined the faculty of Princeton University in the department of computer science as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 1999 and to professor in 2003. In 2006, he joined the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but computer science remains his home department. In 2005, he became the director of the Center for Information and Technology Policy at Princeton. He has served as a consultant to law firms, corporations, private foundations, and government agencies. His research involves computer security, and technology policy.
He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his family. From 2006 to 2010, he was a member of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In November 2010, he was named Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission.
In 2013, Felton was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to security of computer systems, and for impact on public policy.
On May 11, 2015, he was named Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for The White House.
United States v. Microsoft
Felten was a witness for the United States government in United States v. Microsoft, where the software company was charged with committing a variety of antitrust crimes. During the trial, Microsoft's attorneys denied that it was possible to remove the Internet Explorer web browser from a Windows 98 equipped computer without significantly impairing the operation of Windows.
Citing research he had undertaken with Christian Hicks and Peter Creath, two of his former students, Felten testified that it was possible to remove Internet Explorer functionality from Windows without causing any problems with the operating system. He demonstrated his team's tool in court, showing 19 ways in which it is normally possible to access the web browser from the Windows platform that his team's tool rendered inaccessible.
Microsoft argued that Felten's changes did not truly remove Internet Explorer but only made its functionality inaccessible to the end user by removing icons, shortcuts and the iexplore.exe executable file, and making changes to the system registry. This led to a debate as to what exactly constitutes the "web browser," since much of the core functionality of Internet Explorer is stored in a shared dynamic-link library, accessible to any program running under Windows.
Microsoft also argued that Felten's tool did not even completely remove web-browsing capability from the system since it was still possible to access the web through other Windows executables besides iexplore.exe, such as the Windows help system.
The SDMI challenge
As part of a contest in 2000, SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) invited researchers and others to try to break the digital audio watermark technologies that they had devised. In a series of individual challenges, the participants were given a sample audio piece, with one of the watermarks embedded. If the participants sent back the sample with the watermark removed (and with less than an acceptable amount of signal loss, though this condition was not stated by SDMI), they would win that particular challenge.
Felten was an initial participant of the contest. He chose to opt out of confidentiality agreements that would have made his team eligible for the cash prize. Despite being given very little or no information about the watermarking technologies other than the audio samples and having only three weeks to work with them, Felten and his team managed to modify the files sufficiently that SDMI's automated judging system declared the watermark removed.
SDMI did not accept that Felten had successfully broken the watermark according to the rules of the contest, noting that there was a requirement for files to lose no sound quality. SDMI claimed that the automated judging result was inconclusive, as a submission which simply wiped all the sounds off the file would have successfully removed the watermark but would not meet the quality requirement.
Sony rootkit investigation
The 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal started when security researcher Mark Russinovich revealed on October 31, 2005 that Sony's Extended Copy Protection ("XCP") copy protection software on the CD Get Right with the Man by Van Zant contained hidden files that could damage the operating system, install spyware and make the user's computer vulnerable to attack when the CD was played on a Microsoft Windows-based PC. Sony then released a software patch to remove XCP.
On November 15, 2005, Felten and J. Alex Halderman showed that Sony's method for removing XCP copy protection software from the computer makes it more vulnerable to attack, as it essentially installed a rootkit, in the form of an Active X control used by the uninstaller, and left it on the user's machine and set so as to allow any web page visited by the user to execute arbitrary code. Felten and Halderman described the problem in a blog post:
The consequences of the flaw are severe, it allows any Web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. Any Web page can seize control of your computer; then it can do anything it likes. That's about as serious as a security flaw can get.
