Skip to Content Java Solaris Communities Partners My Sun Sun Store United States Worldwide

»  Spotlight Articles
»  Projects
»  Publications
»  People
»  Awards
»  Events
»  Downloads
»  Internships
»  Contrarian Minds
»  About Sun Labs

Susan Landau

Susan Landau
Susan Landau is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she concentrates on the interplay between security and public policy. Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University. She and Whitfield Diffie have written Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. She served for six years on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. Currently she is an associate editor for IEEE Security and Privacy and a section board member of Communications of the ACM. She maintains researcHers, a mailing list for women computer science researchers and the Booklist, a list of computer science books by women computer scientists. Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an ACM Distinguished Engineer.

Biographical Information

Susan Landau is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where she concentrates on the interplay between security and public policy. She is currently working on surveillance issues. Her earlier activities included digital rights management, where she helped establish Sun's stance on DRM, and work on cryptography and export control.

Before joining Sun, Landau was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts and Wesleyan University, and held visiting positions at Yale, Cornell, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. She also spent many summers teaching at the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics, a program for high-ability high school students (cf. Supporting a National Treasure).

Landau and Whitfield Diffie have written Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption, which won the 1998 Donald McGannon Communication Policy Research Award, and the 1999 IEEE-USA Award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession (an updated and expanded edition was published in spring 2007.) Landau is also primary author of the 1994 Association for Computing Machinery report ``Codes, Keys, and Conflicts: Issues in US Crypto Policy.'' Prior to her work in policy, Landau did research in symbolic computation and algebraic algorithms, discovering several polynomial-time algorithms for problems that previously only had exponential-time solutions.

Landau is the recipient of the 2008 Women of Vision Social Impact Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an ACM Distinguished Engineer. She served for six years on the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, as well as a member of the Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's Advisory Committee on Privacy and Security and ACM's Committee on Law and Computing Technology as well as an associate editor of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. She has appeared on NPR several times, and has had articles published in the ``Boston Globe,'' ``Chicago Tribune,'' ``Christian Science Monitor,'' ``Scientific American,'' ``Washington Post,'' as well as in numerous scientific journals. Landau received her PhD from MIT (1983), her MS from Cornell (1979), and her BA from Princeton (1976).

Publications

(Publications are arranged by subject and may be listed in more than one category if appropriate.)

  • Digital Rights Management

  • Security and Public Policy

  • Cryptography

  • Identity Management and Project Liberty

  • Symbolic Computation
    • S. Landau, "Computations with Algebraic Numbers," in J. Grabmeier, E. Kaltofen, and V. Weispfennig (eds.), Computer Algebra Handbook, Spring Verlag, 2003, pp. 18-19.
    • S. Landau and N. Immerman, Embedding Linkages in Integer Lattices, Algorithmica, Vol. 43, No. 5, May 2000, pp. 115-120. A preliminary version appeared in MSI Workshop on Computational Geometry, October, 1994.
    • S. Landau, Compute and Conjecture, Commentary (In My Opinion), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Feb. 1999, p. 189.
    • S. Landau, : Four Different Views, Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 1998), pp. 55-60.
    • D. Kozen, S. Landau, and R. Zippel, Decomposition of Algebraic Functions, Journal of Symbolic Computation, Vol. 22 (1996), pp. 235-246. A preliminary version appeared in Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (1994).
    • S. Landau, How to Tangle with a Nested Radical, Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Spring 1994), pp. 49-55.
    • S. Landau, "Finding Maximal Subfields," SIGSAM Bulletin, Vol. 27, No. 3 (1993), pp. 4-8.
    • S. Landau, Simplification of Nested Radicals, SIAM J. of Comput., Vol. 21 (1992), pp. 85-110. A preliminary version appeared in Thirtieth Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (1989), pp. 314-319.
    • S. Landau, A Note on `Zippel Denesting,' J. Symb. Comput., Vol. 13 (1992), pp. 41-47.
    • J. Cremona and S. Landau, Shrinking Lattice Polyhedra, SIAM J. of Discrete Math, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1990), pp. 338-348. A preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of the First ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (1990), pp. 188-193.
    • D. Kozen and S. Landau, Polynomial Decomposition Algorithms, J. Symb. Comput., Vol. 7 (1989), pp. 445-456. Appeared in a different version as J. von zur Gathen, D. Kozen and S. Landau, "Functional Decomposition of Polynomials" Twenty-Eight Annual IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science (1989), pp. 314-319.
    • S. Landau, Factoring Polynomials Quickly, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, [Special Article Series], vol. 34, No. 1 (1987), pp. 3-8.
    • S. Landau and G. Miller, Solvability by Radicals is in Polynomial Time, J. Comput. Sys. Sci., Vol. 30, No. 2 (1985), pp. 179-208. A preliminary version appeared in Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (19830, pp. 140-151.
    • S. Landau, Factoring Polynomials over Algebraic Number Fields, SIAM J. of Comput., Vol. 14, No. 1 (1985), pp. 184-195.
    • S. Landau, "Polynomial Time Algorithms for Galois Groups," Proceedings of the Int'l. Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (1984), Spring Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, No. 174, pp. 225-236.

  • Complexity
    • N. Immerman and S. Landau, The Complexity of Iterated Multiplication, Information and Computation Vol. 116, No. 1 (1995), pp. 103-116. A preliminary version appeared in Fourth Annual Structure in Complexity Conference (1989), pp. 104-111.
    • S. Landau and N. Immerman, The Similarities (and Differences) between Polynomials and Integers, Int'l. Conf. on Number Theoretic and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science (1993), pp. 57-59.

  • Women in Science

  • Miscellaneous
    • S. Landau, Internet Time, Commentary (In My Opinion), Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March 2000, p. 325.
    • S. Landau, The Myth of the Young Mathematician, Letter from the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Nov. 1997, p. 1284.
    • S. Landau, Mathematicians and Social Responsibility, Letter from the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Feb. 1997, p. 188.
    • S. Landau, Rising to the Challenge, Letter from the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, June, 1996, p. 652.
    • S. Landau, "Joseph Rotblat: From Fission Research to a Prize for Peace," Scientific American, Jan. 1996, pp. 38-39.
    • S. Landau, Joseph Rotblat: The Road Less Traveled, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan.-Feb. 1996, pp. 46-54.
    • S. Landau, Something There is That Doesn't Love a Wall, Letter from the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Nov. 1995, p. 1268.
    • S. Landau, Letter from the Editor, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, May 1995, p. 524.
    • S. Landau, "The Secret of Life is a Nontrivial Computation," SIAM News, May 1991, pp. 12-13.
    • S. Landau, "The Responsible Use of `Expert' Systems," Proceedings of the Symposium on Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing (1987), pp. 167-181. Also appeared in Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, Vol. 1, Ablex Publishing Corp. (1989), pp. 191-202.
    • S. Landau, "What's Doing in Ithaca, New York," New York Times, Sept. 9, 1979, Section X, p. 7.

    Professional Activities (recent)

    Honors and Awards

    Contact Information

    Sun Microsystems
    MS UBUR02-311
    35 Network Drive
    Burlington, MA 01803

    Phone: 413-259-2018
    Fax: 413-253-2156
    Email: susan.landau at sun.com


  • Would you recommend this Sun site to a friend or colleague?
    Contact About Sun News Employment Privacy Terms of Use Trademarks Copyright 1994-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc.