Profile | Dan Boneh
Co-Director, Stanford Cyber Policy Center, Rajeev Motwani Professor in the School of Engineering, Professor of Electrical Engineering
Dan Boneh wants policy makers to understand the power of cryptography so that any debate about cyber security can be fully informed. “People assume that certain things cannot be done and that drives their internal model of what policy should look like,” said Boneh, who co-directs the Stanford Cyber Policy Center.
Boneh can list dozens of examples where tension between competing desires—the desire for high quality service and the need for complete privacy—leads to the belief that we must compromise on one to obtain the other; that we must give service providers our sacred data so that they can help us find a friend or navigate a new city. “With clever applications of cryptography, we can achieve the best of both worlds: high quality service, without revealing much about ourselves,” Boneh said. “It sounds impossible but it’s the world we live in.”
Many times, companies offer quality service, but stop short of making these services private because they have other priorities. “To me, this is a failure of incentives,” Boneh said., adding that policy makers can use a combination or carrots and sticks, as members of the European Parliament did to create the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
As a chaired professor in the school of engineering, Boneh heads Stanford’s applied cryptography group and co-directs the computer security lab. His research seeks to improve security for all technology sectors. He and his group work in three main areas: computer security and cryptography; adversarial machine learning; and quantum computing.
The first, computer security and cryptography, deals with traditional concerns like user authentication, protecting information, and supply chain issues. Boneh works on ways to strengthen second factor authentication, and to ensure that systems remain secure even if they run on top of software or hardware that contains a backdoor. He also works on privately aggregating user data across a large population, and on cryptographic mechanisms for a modern financial system.
In his work on adversarial machine learning, Boneh researches ways to protect the learning algorithms that allow computers to identify faces or fly planes (as two examples). While strengthening the algorithms, he seeks to uncover the weaknesses that would prevent them from working if someone with malintent found the weaknesses first.
“Machine learning models will be driving our cars, controlling our food supply, and running our financial systems,” Boneh said. “If you can’t trust them in adversarial settings, we’re going to have difficulty deploying them.”
Boneh’s work on quantum computing focuses on the future, when computers will use quantum physics instead of classical physics to solve problems that can’t be solved any other way. These quantum computers will revolutionize computer science and demand astute policy decisions because the first country to build them will have a significant technological lead.
After earning his PhD from Princeton University, Boneh joined the Stanford faculty in 1997. He was awarded the 2013 Gödel Prize for theoretical computer science, and two years later, the ACM Prize in Computing. In 2016 he was elected to the national academy of engineering.
In 2016, Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia who leads the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Security, asked Boneh to collaborate on the Cyber Initiative, a precursor to the Cyber Policy Center. When the Center was created to incorporate six programs that work at the intersection of technology and policy, Boneh became Co-Director with Nate Persily, the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law.