Salvatore J. Stolfo

Early Life

Salvatore J. Stolfo was born in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Brooklyn College in 1974, followed by a Ph.D. from the NYU Courant Institute in 1979. Upon completing his doctorate, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he has remained ever since.

Academic Career

At Columbia, Stolfo has taught a wide range of courses including Artificial Intelligence, Intrusion and Anomaly Detection Systems, Introduction to Programming, Fundamental Algorithms, Data Structures, and Knowledge-Based Expert Systems. Over the course of his career, he has received close to $50 million in research funding, published or co-authored more than 250 papers, and accumulated over 46,000 citations with an H-index of 102.

Among his earliest research contributions, Stolfo and colleague Greg Vesonder of Bell Labs developed ACE (Automated Cable Expertise), a large-scale expert data analysis system designed for the national telephone network. AT&T Bell Labs distributed ACE to telephone wire centers to improve the management and scheduling of repairs in the local loop.

Stolfo also contributed to the development of DADO, a parallel computing system that introduced the primitive known as "Broadcast, Resolve, Report" — a hardwired mechanism that is recognized today as a precursor to what is now called MapReduce.

In 1996, Stolfo proposed a DARPA project applying machine learning to behavioral patterns for the purpose of detecting fraud and network intrusion. That same year, he pioneered and patented decoy-based active behavioral authentication technology, which would later form the foundation of several commercial ventures.

Stolfo coined the term FOG computing — distinct from the more widely known "fog computing" — to describe the use of technology to launch disinformation attacks against malicious insiders, making it difficult for them to distinguish real sensitive customer data from fabricated decoy data.

In 2005, he received funding from the Army Research Office to organize a workshop aimed at identifying a research agenda focused on insider threats.

Companies and Commercialization

Stolfo has founded or co-founded several companies to bring his laboratory research to market. His company Electronic Digital Documents produced a DataBlade technology that Informix marketed during its mid-1980s acquisition and development strategy; the patented EDD DataCleanser DataBlade was licensed by Informix, which was later acquired by IBM.

System Detection was founded to commercialize anomaly detection technology developed in Columbia's IDS lab. The company was later reorganized and rebranded as Trusted Computer Solutions, which was subsequently acquired by Raytheon.

In 2009, Stolfo co-founded Allure Security Technology, built on research conducted under DARPA sponsorship in Columbia's IDS lab. The company focused on detecting intruders who had already breached an organization's perimeter and on continuously authenticating users without passwords, drawing on Stolfo's 1996 decoy technology patents. Allure Security was also associated with DARPA's Active Authentication and Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales programs, and was co-founded with Dr. Angelos Keromytis.

In 2011, Stolfo co-founded Red Balloon Security with Dr. Ang Cui, a spinout from the IDS lab. Red Balloon developed a symbiote technology called FRAK as a host defense for embedded systems, supported under DARPA's Cyber Fast Track program.

A jury awarded Columbia University $185 million in a patent infringement case involving Stolfo's Application Communities technology. A subsequent judicial order applied nearly treble damages, resulting in a final award of approximately $481 million against Gen Digital.

Recognition

Stolfo was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2018 "for his contributions to machine learning based cybersecurity." He was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to machine-learning-based cybersecurity and parallel hardware for database inference systems."