Quick Facts
Biography
Dorothy Elizabeth Denning (born August 12, 1945) is an American information security researcher who is a graduate of the University of Michigan. She has published four books and 140 articles. At Georgetown University, she was the Patricia and Patrick Callahan Family Professor of computer science and director of the Georgetown Institute of Information Assurance. She is now a professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.
Career
Dorothy E. Denning, assisted by Peter G. Neumann, published a model of an IDS in 1986 that formed the basis for many systems today. Her model used statistics for anomaly detection, and resulted in an early IDS at SRI International named the Intrusion Detection Expert System (IDES), which ran on Sun workstations and could consider both user and network level data. IDES had a dual approach with a rule-based Expert System to detect known types of intrusions plus a statistical anomaly detection component based on profiles of users, host systems, and target systems. It was suggested that adding an artificial neural network as a third component. Denning said all three components could then report to a resolver. SRI followed IDES in 1993 with the Next-generation Intrusion Detection Expert System (NIDES). The Multics intrusion detection and alerting system (MIDAS), an expert system using P-BEST and Lisp, was developed in 1988 based on the work of Denning and Neumann.
Denning has received several awards. Among them are the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, National Computer Systems Security Award, and the 2004 Harold F. Tipton Award "in recognition of her outstanding information security career". In 1995 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Denning privately reviewed, at federal request, the Skipjack block cipher, as part of the controversial Clipper chip initiative, put forth by the NSA for encryption of private communications. In Congressional testimony, she stated that general publication of the algorithm would enable someone to build a hardware or software product that used SKIPJACK without escrowing keys. In public forums, such as the Usenet forum comp.risks, she defended this program.
Denning also served as a witness in the 1990 trial of United States v. Riggs. Her testimony was instrumental in leading the government to drop charges against defendant Craig Neidorf.
Family
In 1974 she married Peter J. Denning. He is currently the Chairman of the Computer Science Department at the Naval Postgraduate School. She is the daughter of C. Lowell and Helen Watson Robling.