Edward Felten

Felten attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in Physics in 1985. He worked as a staff programmer at Caltech from 1986 to 1989 on a parallel supercomputer project at Caltech. He then enrolled as a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of Washington. He was awarded a Master of Science degree in 1991 and a Ph.D in 1993. His Ph.D. thesis was on developing an automated protocol for communication between parallel processors.

In 1993, he joined the faculty of Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999 and to Professor in 2003. In 2006, he joined the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, but computer science remains his home department. In 2005, he became the Director of the Center for Information and Technology Policy at Princeton. He has served as a consultant to law firms, corporations, private foundations, and government agencies. His research involves computer security, and technology policy.

As part of a contest in 2000, SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) invited researchers and others to try to break the digital audio watermark technologies that they had devised. In a series of individual challenges, the participants were given a sample audio piece, with one of the watermarks embedded. If the participants sent back the sample with the watermark removed (and with less than an acceptable amount of signal loss, though this condition was not stated by SDMI), they would win that particular challenge.

Felten presented his paper at the USENIX security conference in 2001. The United States Department of Justice has offered Felten and other researchers assurances that the DMCA does not threaten their work and stated that the legal threats against them were invalid.

The 2005 Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal started when security researcher Mark Russinovich revealed on October 31, 2005 that Sony's Extended Copy Protection ("XCP") copy protection software on the CD Get Right with the Man by Van Zant contained hidden files that could damage the operating system, install spyware and make the user's computer vulnerable to attack when the CD was played on a Microsoft Windows-based PC. Sony then released a software patch to remove XCP.

On November 15, 2005, Felten and J. Alex Halderman showed that Sony's method for removing XCP copy protection software from the computer makes it more vulnerable to attack, as it essentially installed a rootkit, in the form of an Active X control used by the uninstaller, and left it on the user's machine and set so as to allow any web page visited by the user to execute arbitrary code. Felten and Halderman described the problem in a blog post:

On September 13, 2006, Felten and graduate students Ariel Feldman and Alex Halderman discovered severe security flaws in a Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) voting machine. Their findings claimed, "Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."

He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his family. From 2006 to 2010, he was a member of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In early 2008, New Jersey election officials announced that they planned to send one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines to Ed Felten and Andrew Appel (also of Princeton University) for analysis. In March 2008, Sequoia sent an e-mail to Professor Felten asserting that allowing him to examine Sequoia voting machines would violate the license agreement between Sequoia and the county which bought them, and also that Sequoia would take legal action "to stop [...] any non-compliant analysis, [...] publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property." This action sparked outrage among computer technology activists.

In February 2008, Felten and his students were part of the team that discovered the cold boot attack, which allows someone with physical access to a computer to bypass operating system protections and extract the contents of its memory.

In November 2010, he was named Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission.

In November 2010, Felten was named the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, for which he took a one-year leave of absence from Princeton University.

On May 11, 2015, he was named Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for The White House.