Ross Anderson’s mission is to develop the discipline of security engineering, which investigates how systems can be made robust in the face of malice, error and mischance. He has made pioneering contributions to many subdisciplines, including peer-to-peer-networks, hardware tamper resistance and cryptographic protocols. Ross was a designer of the block cipher Serpent, and he has worked on many applications with diverse protection requirements such as payment networks, power-line communications, goods vehicle tachographs and clinical information systems.

In addition, Ross helped to found the field of information security economics. Many complex systems fail not for technical reasons, but because of misaligned incentives. Consequently, game theory and microeconomic analysis are nowadays just as important to the security engineer as the mathematics of cryptology.

Ross is the author of the standard text Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems (2008) and regularly contributes to a blog on security research, Light Blue Touchpaper. He has also chairs the Foundation for Information Policy Research.