Obligatory Bio

I’m William (Will) Clarkson, a 5th year Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at Princeton University. I’m a member of the Security Group and the Center for Information Technology Policy. My advisor is Ed Felten is currently on leave as the Chief Technologist for the FTC. I graduated in 2003 from Tulane University with a degree in Computer Engineering. I spent a summer working at Diebold Inc. in their security group, and a few summers at Google working on various projects.

In my free time I attend as many blues concerts as time allows, and I enjoy finding less well known artists.

Research

My research interests focus on re-evaluating assumptions about the indistinguishability of seemingly identical or anonymous items. In each of the items I’ve studied, they each have distinguishing physical features, often inherent to the item, that allow them to be identified by measuring that feature with a cheap sensor – e.g. desktop scanner. At the completion of my Ph.D. I will be joining Google.

Publications

2011 Bubble Trouble: Off-Line De-Anonymization of Bubble Forms
2009 Some Consequences of Paper Fingerprinting for Elections
2009 Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners
2008 Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys

For abstracts, PDF and BibTex, see my Publications.