Registration is now closed
The Rossfest Symposium and its posthumous Festschrift is a celebration and remembrance of our friend and colleague Ross Anderson, who passed away suddenly on 28 March 2024, aged 67.
Ross Anderson FRS FRSE FREng was Professor of Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge and lately also at the University of Edinburgh. He was a world-leading figure in security. He had a gift for pulling together the relevant key people and opening up a new subfield of security research by convening a workshop on the topic that would then go on to become an established series, from Fast Software Encryption to Information Hiding, Workshop on Economics and Information Security, Security and Human Behavior and so forth. He co-authored between 300 and 400 papers. His encyclopedic Security Engineering textbook (well over 1000 pages) is dense with both war stories and references to research papers. An inspiring and encouraging supervisor, Ross graduated thirty-one PhD students and contributed to supervising many others. And as a contagiously enthusiastic public speaker he inspired thousands of researchers around the world.
The Rossfest Symposium is an opportunity for all of us who were touched by Ross to get together and celebrate his legacy.
The Festschrift volume
Scientific papers
We collected scientific contributions towards a posthumous Festschrift volume, in the form of short, punchy papers on any security-related topic. The submissions were selected by a Program Committee composed of former PhD students of Ross:
- Joseph Bonneau, New York University
- Richard Clayton, University of Cambridge
- Markus Kuhn, University of Cambridge
- Tyler Moore, University of Tulsa
- Ilia Shumailov, Google DeepMind
- Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge
The selected papers will be published in the Festschrift book and presented at the event. A future special issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity, honouring Ross’s scholarly contributions and legacy, will include revised versions of some of them.
Attendees who preordered the Festschrift volume will receive it at the Symposium. Further copies may be bought by anyone (attendees or not) through print-on-demand. A DRM-free PDF will be available online from this page at no charge.
Informal memories
We also collected informal “cherished memories” contributions along the lines of those collected by Anh V. Vu at anderson.love. These too are in the volume and a selection of them will be presented orally at the event.
The Rossfest Symposium
The Rossfest Symposium will take place on Tuesday 25 March 2025 at the Computer Laboratory (a.k.a. the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge), where Ross taught, researched and originally obtained his own PhD. Street address: 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK.
Thanks to generous support from Google DeepMind, the University of Hertfordshire and our own Department, attendance at the Rossfest Symposium, including lunch and coffee breaks, is free and not conditional on the submission of a contribution; but it is reserved to those who registered. Registration is now closed.
There shall also be a formal evening banquet at Trinity College Cambridge, where Ross studied as an undergraduate. Ross’s brother Iain will give the after-dinner speech. The dress code for the evening banquet is formal, but open to interpretation. Turn up in black tie and gown if you fancy, or anything else that you feel makes you look smart.
We have timed the Rossfest to be adjacent in time and space to the Security Protocols Workshop, an event that Ross regularly attended. The SPW will take place in Trinity College Cambridge on 26 and 27 March 2025. Registrations for SPW are now also closed.
Schedule for the day
Doors will be open from 09:00 for registration, collecting your badge and merchandise, and mingling with other friends of Ross over tea and coffee. Please arrive in time to complete registration (collecting your badge and merchandise) before 10:00, when the event will start.
at Department of Computer Science and Technology, CB3 0FD
| Time | What | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 0900 | registration and coffee | |
| 1000 | welcome | Iain Anderson, Frank Stajano |
| 1015 | perspectives | Virgil Gligor |
| 1030 | panel 1 | Rainer Böhme; John McHugh, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi |
| 1100 | coffee break | |
| 1145 | panel 2 | Susan Landau, William Yurcik; Yangheran Piao, Marie Vasek, Awais Rashid, Steven Murdoch, Kevin Fu |
| 1245 | lunch | |
| 1415 | panel 3 | Tyler Moore; Partha Das Chowdhury, L Jean Camp, Marilyne Ordekian, Helen Oliver, Alice Hutchings |
| 1500 | memories 1 | William Morland, John Naughton, Carl Landwehr, Anh Vu, Sven Dietrich, Fabio Massacci, Andrew Watson, Marc Tobias |
| 1530 | coffee break | |
| 1615 | panel 4 | Bruce Schneier; Adam Shostack, Christian Eichenmüller, Simon Parkin, Stuart Schechter, Zina Benenson |
| 1700 | memories 2 | Andrei Serjantov, Andy Farnell, Nicolas Christin, Boris Hemkemeier, Joseph Bonneau, Wendy Grossman, Duncan Campbell, Rafi Yahalom |
| 1730 | end of computer lab part |
at Trinity College, CB2 1TQ
| Time | What |
|---|---|
| 1900 | drinks reception |
| 1945 | banquet |
| 2200 | END |
Accommodation in Cambridge
The chosen dates are out of term, meaning you might be able to book a room in one of the 31 colleges through www.universityrooms.com. Otherwise, consider www.airbnb.com, www.booking.com, www.expedia.com or your favourite online booking aggregator.
Dates
| Date(s) | Significance |
|---|---|
| 25 March 2025 | Rossfest Symposium (and optional banquet) |
| 26-27 March 2025 | Security Protocols Workshop (unrelated but possibly of interest) |