Acknowledgments

We have so many people to thank that it is difficult to figure out where to begin. It has been said that ideas cannot be created in a vacuum and in this we believe wholeheartedly. Malicious Cryptography is the product of interactions and collaborations that span over a decade. In truth we have family, friends, teachers, coworkers, researchers, students, anonymous referees, journalists,¹ science-fiction authors, movie writers, artists, and musicians² to acknowledge. Without such support, enthusiasm, artistic creativity, teachers, and listeners, this book would not have been possible.

First and foremost we thank Columbia University, our mutual alma mater. It was at Columbia that our research began, and it was at Columbia where we met a great number of brilliant people from whom we learned, and with whom we worked and shared ideas. We thank Zvi Galil, Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, who served as faculty advisor to us both. We thank Jonathan Gross and Andrew Kosoresow, both of whom served on Adam's PhD committee. Andrew was a great and dedicated educator, and we mourn his untimely passing. We thank Matt Franklin and Stuart Haber, both of whom graduated from Columbia. Matt and Stuart have served as collaborators to us both as well as lecturers in graduate courses taken by Adam. On numerous occasions Adam flew into Matt Franklin's office, wide-eyed and somewhat insane looking, for the sole purpose of scrawling a brand new attack on his blackboard just to see how he would react. Adam also thanks Matt Blaze for teaching an inspiring course on computer security in 1995 and for fostering great interest in cryptography among his students. Moti extends his gratitude to all of his coauthors and everyone he has worked with over the years, since it is through scientific work and the exchange of ideas that one develops as a researcher.

We thank Markus Jakobsson from RSA Data Security. Moti mentored Markus throughout his dissertation defense preparation and Markus in turn served on Adam's PhD committee. Markus reviewed this text and has sponsored annual lectures on Cryptovirology at NYU. We thank Yiannis Tsiounis, another student that Moti assisted, for sharing ideas and for reviewing this book. We thank our colleague Yair Frankel for sponsoring an invited lecture on kleptography for the Information Surety Group at Sandia National Labs. We thank Michael Reiter for supporting Adam while at Lucent Technologies in the Secure Systems Research Division, and for hosting a lecture on subliminal channels and kleptography.

Adam thanks Matthew Hastings from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Over the course of four years at Yale, Matt and Adam jointly experimented with self-replicating code in a safe and controlled environment. Many of the discoveries and open problems that were found gave impetus to investigating advanced malicious software attacks. Adam also thanks Mark Reed from the Yale University Department of Electrical Engineering. Mark served as Adam's undergraduate faculty advisor and provided support for his career both inside and outside of the classroom.

Adam thanks Cigital Labs and in particular Jeff Voas, Jeff Payne, Gary McGraw, and Matt Schmid for encouraging this work. We thank Christoph C. Michael, senior research scientist at Cigital Labs, for engaging conversations, contributing artwork, and for lending an ear to a never-ending stream of clandestine malware rhetoric. We also thank Alexander Antonov and Paul DesRivières from the Cigital Secure Software Group for reviewing the manuscript line by line and Mike Copenhafer, Bruce Potter, Mike Firetti, Viren Shah, Frank Hill, Coleman Baker, and Chris Ren from Cigital for helpful reviews and discussions.

From Wiley we thank Carol Long,³ Eileen Calabro, Fred Bernardi, Robert Ipsen, and Kathryn Malm. Carol and her team produced this book in remarkably short order with the utmost degree of professionalism.

Special thanks goes to Dmitriy Pozdnyakov, Michael Makarius, Leo C. Petroski, and H. Robert Feinberg for helpful feedback and overall support of this work. Finally Adam would like to thank his wife, Elisa Young, for being. Without her this book would cease to have meaning.