Stefan Savage
More info
- Affiliation
- UC San Diego
- Known for
- Automotive security, spam economics, IP traceback
UC San Diego professor whose group showed that cars can be hijacked remotely and that the spam economy hinges on a handful of banks.
Savage has an unusual habit of measuring security rather than merely modelling it. "IP traceback" (2000) proposed having routers mark packets so DoS attackers could be traced. In 2010 and 2011 he, Tadayoshi Kohno and colleagues showed that a stock car's control units could be driven over the CAN bus — and then reached wirelessly, through the cellular modem and Bluetooth. Carmakers suddenly found a budget for security.
For "Click Trajectories" (2011) the group bought hundreds of spam-advertised products and followed the money: nearly every payment cleared through three banks. That made an entire botnet industry vulnerable to a single phone call to the card networks. Savage received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.