James Mickens
More info
- Affiliation
- Microsoft Research, Harvard University
- Known for
- This World of Ours (2014)
Harvard computer scientist who wrote the funniest, and possibly most quoted, pieces on why security research so often misses reality.
Mickens works on distributed systems and web performance, first at Microsoft Research and later as a professor at Harvard. Wider fame came from his columns in USENIX's ;login:, above all "This World of Ours" (2014). It reduces the entire threat model to two cases: either your adversary is the Mossad, in which case no protocol on Earth will save you, or it isn't, in which case a sensible password will do.
The joke has a serious core: research effort piles up on threats few people face, while real breaches happen through sloppiness and boring bugs. His talks on machine learning and ethics follow the same arc — laughter first, discomfort after.