Computer science graduate student Alex Halderman describes his efforts to uncover security flaws and privacy violations in copyright-protection technologies in an article in the March 22 issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. Halderman, who works with Professor of Computer Science Ed Felten, has been a leader in a number of high-profile cases, including the discovery of flaws in technology used to prevent copying of certain Sony CDs.

“I’ve always been interested in the practical side of computers, how they interact with the real world,” Halderman told the Alumni Weekly. “And security is one area of computer science where the problems we’re trying to solve impact the real world in a myriad of different places far away from where we started. If there’s a vulnerability in a particular piece of software that’s widely used, that may affect many millions of people instantly and directly.”