The security world lost one of its giants. Professor Ross Anderson passed away in April 2024, and the industry is still feeling the weight of it.
Anderson wasn’t just another academic. He literally wrote the book on security engineering — the textbook that trained a generation of researchers and practitioners. His work spanned everything from cryptography to tamper resistance to economics of security, a field he basically invented.
He founded the Cambridge Security Group and supervised countless PhD students who went on to shape the industry. His research on why security failures happen — the incentives, the misaligned priorities — changed how people think about building secure systems.
Anderson was also fiercely independent. He didn’t shy away from calling out bad policy or broken technology. His blog was required reading for anyone serious about security.
He’ll be remembered as a pioneer, a mentor, and someone who asked the hard questions others avoided.
