Ross Anderson is Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University. He is a co-founder of a vigorously-growing new discipline: the economics of information security. Many security failures can be traced to wrong incentives rather than technical errors, and the application of microeconomic theory has shed new light on many problems that were previously considered to be intractable. The work is particularly important for understanding not just online crime but also system safety and dependability, as well as more traditional security problems of interest to the law enforcement and insurance industries.

Ross also made seminal contributions to peer-to-peer systems; hardware tamper-resistance; emission security; copyright marking; crypto protocols; and the security of APIs. He has written extensively on the failures of real-world systems, including automatic teller machines, prepayment meters and medical record systems. He is a Fellow of the IET and the IMA, and wrote the standard textbook ‘Security Engineering—A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems’. He chairs the Foundation for Information Policy Research, the main UK think-tank on internet and technology policy issues.