Seeing Light at the End of the Cybersecurity Tunnel

ACM athena award recipient Elisa Bertino, a professor at Purdue University and research director of the Cyber Space Security Lab of Purdue's Department of Computer Science, has spent her career trying to ensure the security and integrity of the information that is stored in databases and transmitted over mobile, social, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and sensor networks. Here, she talks about how her research interests have evolved and why she's not pessimistic about the future of cybersecurity. You began your research career in the field of databases, first at the Italian National Research Council, and later as a post-doc at IBM's San Jose Research Laboratory. What drew you to security? My original interest in security began at IBM, where I was looking into how to protect the data stored in databases.