Thomas Heydt-Benjamin is at home in New York.
I study security and cryptography with a focus on privacy enhancing technologies and pervasive/ubiquitous computing with the ETH Zürich System Security Group where Srdjan Capkun is my supervisor.
Thomas Heydt-Benjamin studies security and privacy properties of ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems in the ETH Zürich System Security Group. Thomas brings with him to this work his prior experience in both attacks on and defenses of pervasive computing systems. In 2007 he participated in investigation of new contactless smart credit cards used in the United States, in which the team discovered serious flaws. In 2008 he and colleagues examined security and privacy properties of pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, determining that some aspects of existing designs may present dangerous security vulnerabilities. As a member of the security and cryptography team at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory from 2008 to 2009, Thomas worked with ZRL’s famous anonymous credentials systems, inventing several extensions to anonymous credentials. Thomas is currently focused on novel solutions to real world security problems in resource constrained devices similar to the credit cards and pacemakers he has previously studied. Thomas started hacking and exploring computer security systems at age 6 when first exposed to assembler programming on the IBM PC. This early interest lead to formal study of computer science during high school through the Science Honors Program at Columbia University. He then earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Yale University, and a Master of Science in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thomas greatly believes in the importance of bringing science to a wide audience. For this reason Thomas travels frequently to give invited talks, and to appear on television and radio. Past appearances include ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today Show, and NPR’s Leonard Lopate Show, and the New York Times.
