Peter Gutmann (computer scientist)

This article is about the New Zealand computer scientist. For the journalist, see Peter Gutmann (journalist).

Peter Gutmann is a computer scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Auckland. His Ph.D. thesis and a book based on the thesis were about a cryptographic security architecture. He is interested in computer security issues, including security architecture, security usability (or more precisely the lack thereof), and hardware security, he has discovered assorted flaws in publicly released cryptosystems and protocols. He is the developer of the cryptlib open source software security library and contributed to PGP version 2. He is also known for his analysis of data deletion on electronic memory media, magnetic and otherwise, and devised the Gutmann method for erasing data from a hard drive more or less securely. Having lived in New Zealand for some time, he has written on such subjects as wetas, which are peculiar to New Zealand, and the Auckland power crisis of 1998, during which the electrical power system failed completely in the central city for five weeks. See, for instance, Auckland: Your Y2K beta test site on Gutmann's Homepage. He has also written on his career as an "arms courier" for New Zealand, detailing the difficulty faced in complying with customs control regulations with respect to cryptographic products, which were once classed as "munitions" by various jurisdictions including the United States.

Criticism of Windows Vista

His white paper "Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection", in which he described the content protection specification as "the longest suicide note in history", generated considerable public interest since it was first posted in 2006. He discussed this with Steve Gibson in episode #74 of the Security Now! podcast on 2007-01-11.

See also

• Criticism of Windows Vista
• Data privacy
• Information privacy
• Plaintext

Bibliography

• Gutmann, Peter (2003). Cryptographic Security Architecture: Design and Verification, ISBN 978-0-387-95387-8
• Gutmann, Peter (2000). The Design and Verification of a Cryptographic Security Architecture, PhD thesis

References

• Guttman security Algorithm

External links

• Gutmann's Homepage
• Vista copy protection is defended, 2007-01-22 BBC reported Microsoft's response to Gutman's white paper
• Macalope blog