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 was an opportunity for all of us who were touched by Ross to get together and celebrate his legacy.
The Festschrift volume
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 appear in the Festschrift book alongside informal “cherished memories” contributions similar to those collected by Anh V. Vu at anderson.love. A subset of them will appear in a special issue of the Journal of Cybersecurity, honouring Ross’s scholarly contributions and legacy.
We offer a DRM-free PDF of the book at no charge. The volume also includes Ross Anderson’s full bibliography, curated by Richard Clayton, which we also offer separately in bibtex format at no charge. Physical copies of the book were distributed at the Symposium to the attendees who preordered them. Further physical copies of the Rossfest Festschrift may be ordered through print-on-demand.
The Rossfest Symposium
The Rossfest Symposium took 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.
Thanks to generous support from Google DeepMind, the University of Hertfordshire and our own Department, attendance at the Rossfest Symposium was free. There was also a formal evening banquet at Trinity College Cambridge, where Ross studied as an undergraduate. Ross’s brother Iain gave the after-dinner speech.