Brief Biography

Zachary Peterson is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department in the Graduate School of Operational and Information Sciences at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA.  He is also a research associate of the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Security and Privacy Applied Research Lab (SPAR) at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute, and a member of the the Strategic Healthcare IT Advanced Research Projects on Security (SHARPS) project.

His general research interests are in building solutions to compelling interdisciplinary problems, particularly those at the confluence of secure storage systems, applied cryptography, law, and policy.

He is also very interested in engaging students of all ages in science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) disciplines, and in particular, computer security and privacy. He is currently developing non-digital board and card games that are designed to remove traditional barriers associated with using a computer, improve security literacy and introduce students to new career paths related to security and engineering.  His first game, [d0x3d!], introduces network security concepts, terminology and cooperative and adversarial thinking to high school and undergraduate students.

Some of his current research activities include developing efficient proofs of possession and proofs of physical location and jurisdiction of data stored in the cloud.

Zachary holds a PhD in Computer Science earned at The Johns Hopkins University in 2006, where he worked with his advisor, Prof. Randal Burns, and as a member of the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab.  He formerly served as an Assistant Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department at The Johns Hopkins University and as an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at McDaniel College.

He is lead developer of the ext3cow file system.  Ext3cow is a versioning file system based on ext3 that provides a unique time-shifting interface to past data.  It has been used as a foundation for technologies to understand data provenance, improve security and achieve legislative compliance, including: secure deletion, authenticated encryption, incremental authentication and non-repudiation, and role-based access control.  Ext3cow has been featured on Slashdot and digg.

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.

Before his position at the Naval Postgraduate School, Zachary worked as a Senior Security Analyst and Director of the Technology Research and Intellectual Property Services (TRIPS) division at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE), a boutique computer security consulting firm in Baltimore, MD.  There, he performed independent, scientifically motivated, evaluations of software and network infrastructures, including the design and implementation of new security solutions, when necessary.  He was also engaged as an expert witness and consultant in technology and intellectual property litigation, including patent and copyright infringement litigation, anti-piracy cases and DMCA violations.

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

He once hosted a rock'n'roll radio show and podcast, The Quantum Rock Machine, broadcast on WJHU. 

He also helped develop the KEXP iPhone application [iTunes Link].

News

5/3: This Fall, Zachary will be joining the faculty of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, helping building a new Center for Cybersecurity.

3/19: Results of my security-themed haiku extra credit.

1/10: Zachary was invited by the NSF to give a talk about [d0x3d!] at the annual CyberCorps: Scholarship for Service (SFS) Program Symposium.

1/1: Zachary, along with his colleague, Mark Gondree, was interviewed about his first board game for computer security education, [d0x3d!], on BBC Radio 5’s Outriders. Direct link to the interview is here (mp3).