UC Berkeley Professor Dawn Song may well come to be recognized as the mother of computer security. Applying a brilliantly sophisticated analysis that detects malware in binary computer code, Song is championing a revolutionary approach that protect devices, computer systems and internet traffic in general far more effectively than the traditional approach of patching programming errors after security breaches are detected.
Song’s approach has been adopted by two new major security platforms: BitBlaze, which analyzes malicious software code, and WebBlaze, which focuses on defending web-based applications and services against it and is now being used in the design of mainstream web browsers. Her work has become more urgently needed in an era in which hundreds of millions of relatively unsecure smartphones, tablets and laptops offer hackers less well protected access to otherwise secure networks.
For her seminal work on internet security Song was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship of $500,000 on September 28, 2010. The MacArthur Fellows Program, which is limited to U.S. citizens and residents, awards five-year, unrestricted fellowships to individuals across all ages and fields who show exceptional merit and promise of continued creative work. The Foundation’s focus on choosing persons of exceptional talent has prompted some to call its fellows “MacArthur geniuses”.
“Over the past decades our understanding of security has improved tremendously,” Song said after receiving her fellowship. “There will still be new attacks that we cannot foresee, but at least we are getting a much better understanding of the problem domain. The entire field is making fantastic progress in designing new techniques and tools to help people build more secure systems, write more secure code, and also design systems that are easier for users to use in a secure way.
“Also, I have always been fascinated by how we can make computers do great things that the brain is really good at, but computers cannot do well yet. Given the progress that we have had, both in terms of hardware and also in terms of our understanding of how computer algorithms and systems work, I think we will see tremendous progress building even more intelligent and more powerful computers.”
Song has also turned her mind to better ways to detect breaches of private data. Her software allows users to trace their sensitive data to see whether it is secure or has been sold or breached. If the latter, it can ascertain precisely where the data has been sent.
Dawn Song was born in China in 1975. When she was in high school her parents pressured her to go into business. On the advice of her high school science teacher, she opted for science. She majored in physics at Tsinghua University where she received a bachelor of science degree in 1996. After moving to the U.S. to attend Carnegie Mellon University, she decided that she could contribute more in computer science and changed her focus for her masters degree which she received in 1998. She earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002.
She began her academic career as an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2007 she was appointed to an associate professorship at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
