Education
- PhD in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
- BS in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
William Robertson is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, and co-directs the NEU Systems Security Lab. Dr. Robertson’s research revolves around improving the security of operating systems, mobile devices, and the web, making use of techniques such as security by design, program analysis, and anomaly detection. Before joining Northeastern in 2011, he was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley (2009-2011). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara in 2009.
He was involved in both the California Top-to-Bottom-Review (TTBR) and the Ohio EVEREST projects as a Red Team member. In this capacity, he demonstrated that electronic voting systems were susceptible to large-scale attacks that could exploit numerous vulnerabilities in the firmware and physical security of the components of the voting system, leading to significant changes in public policy in both states with respect to electronic voting.
Dr. Robertson also has extensive experience in organizing and participating in Capture-the-Flag (CTF) exercises. With Shellphish, a team composed of UCSB-affiliated members, he won the 2005 edition of the DEFCON CTF competition. He was also instrumental in helping to organize the UCSB iCTF, the largest distributed CTF competition, from its inception in 2003 to 2008.
Dr. Robertson is the program co-chair of the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) for 2015-2016, was the co-chair of the 2013 USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT), co-located with USENIX Security, and was the chair of the 2012 Conference on the Detection of Intrusions and Malware & Vulnerability Assessment (DIMVA). He has participated on the program committees of a number of top-tier systems security venues, including IEEE Security and Privacy, USENIX Security, NDSS, ACSAC, and RAID. He is also the author of more than thirty peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in the area of systems and network security.