Alex Halderman
| J. Alex Halderman | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1981 (age 35–36) |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Michigan |
| Alma mater | Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | Edward Felten |
J. Alex Halderman (born c. 1981) is professor of Computer Science in the University of Michigan College of Engineering, where he is also director of the Center for Computer Security & Society. Halderman's research focuses on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact society and public policy.
Halderman was awarded the A.B. summa cum laude in June 2003, the M.A. in June 2005, and the Ph.D. in June 2009, all in Computer Science from Princeton University. His dissertation, Investigating Security Failures and their Causes: An Analytic Approach to Computer Security, was prepared under the mentorship of Ed Felten.
At the University of Michigan, Halderman has been central to a number of projects including anticensorship in the network infrastructure, weak Diffie–Hellman and the Logjam attack, and the Let’s Encrypt HTTPS certificate authority.
In 2016, Halderman was profiled in Playboy.
After the 2016 United States presidential election, computer scientists, including Halderman, urged the Clinton campaign to request an election recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (three swing states where Trump had won narrowly, while Clinton won New Hampshire and Maine narrowly) for the purpose of excluding the possibility that the hacking of electronic voting machines had influenced the recorded outcome.
On 21 June 2017, Halderman testified before the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The hearing, titled "Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election" focused on the federal government’s role in safeguarding U.S. elections from outside interference. Halderman discussed his own research in computer science and cybersecurity. He discussed one instance where he tampered with a voting machine and demonstrated the ability to change the outcome of an election. He also made three policy recommendations to safeguard U.S. elections: upgrading and replacing obsolete and vulnerable voting machines; consistently and routinely checking that our elections results are accurate; and applying cybersecurity best practices to the design of voting equipment and the management of elections. Halderman fielded questions from the Senators about his research and policy recommendations. At the end of the hearing, Chairman Burr praised Halderman for his work and noted how important his research is.
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