# Professor of Security Engineering, University of Cambridge (1956 to 2024)

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/ross-anderson/
Last updated: 2026-09-20
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

---

## Bio

Ross Anderson (1956 to 2024) was professor of security engineering at Cambridge and wrote Security Engineering, the textbook most practitioners in this field learned from, published in 1993, 2008, and 2020 editions and made freely available. He helped found security economics and campaigned publicly on surveillance, banking liability, and encryption policy.

Profile built from public academic, publication, and press records. Included because his teaching shaped a generation of practitioners.

## Where their work shows up

His central argument was that systems fail where incentives are misaligned, not where the cryptography is weak: banks pushed fraud liability onto customers, so fraud persisted; vendors bore no cost for insecure defaults, so defaults stayed insecure. That lens explains more identity failures than any protocol analysis does, including why [MFA](https://startwithidentity.com/rankings/best-mfa-solutions/) adoption lagged for a decade after the technology worked. See the [breach teardowns](https://startwithidentity.com/breaches/) for what misaligned incentives look like in practice.