Zachary N J Peterson

Brief Biography

Zachary is a Senior Security Analyst and head of the Technology Research and Intellectual Property Services (TRIPS) division at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) in Baltimore, MD. He is also an Assistant Research Scientist of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University. He was once an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at McDaniel College.

He holds a PhD in Computer Science earned at The Johns Hopkins University in 2006, where he worked with his advisor, Prof. Randal Burns (pic), and as a member of the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab.

His general research interests are in storage systems and security, record and content management legislation and other miscellaneous technological and legal topics. He also has an interest in the intersection of computer science and intellectual property, privacy and civil liberty issues.

He is lead developer of the ext3cow file system. Ext3cow is a versioning file system based on ext3 and has been used as a foundation for technologies to improve the security and legislative compliance of information systems, including: secure deletion, authenticated encryption, incremental authentication and non-repudiation. Ext3cow has been featured on Slashdot and digg.

His current research activities include developing verifiable proofs of data storage at untrusted servers.

Past research includes data placement for a copy-on-write file system, file system security, and data placement and scheduling for MEMS-based storage devices.

Zachary holds a BS in Computer Engineering (2000), from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an MS in Computer Science (2002), under his advisor Prof. Darrell Long, from the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MS in Security Informatics (2005) from the Information Security Institute under his advisor, Prof. Avi Rubin, at The Johns Hopkins University.