Abhi Shelat is a computer scientist whose work includes cryptography and empirical studies of data sanitization. His first-person academic biography describes doctoral research on non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and subsequent work at IBM's Zurich research laboratory and universities, including a move to Northeastern in2016.[ref]
With Simson Garfinkel, he studied what information remained on second-hand hard disk drives. Their2003 paper reported acquiring158 drives between November2000 and August2002 and examining what could be recovered from the readable devices. The study made data sanitization a measurable problem in the handling of retired hardware, beyond a claim that files had been deleted.[ref]
An original denominator example explains a limit of such evidence. Suppose a hypothetical sample contains100 drives, of which70 are readable and21 of those contain the specified residual data. The fraction is among readable devices but among all acquired devices. Treating unreadable devices as proven clean would change the scientific claim. Neither ratio establishes a population prevalence without a suitable sampling argument.
His cryptography work and the disk study address different parts of information protection: properties of cryptographic protocols and the behavior of real storage practices. The combination illustrates why a mathematically specified protection mechanism and evidence about its use are complementary research subjects.
Homepage: shelat.khoury.northeastern.edu/bio/
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