About Martin Boldt

I'm a PhD in information security at Blekinge Institute of Technology. I defended my PhD thesis with the title "Privacy-Invasive Software" in  April 2010 (thesis available here). As a member of the research group called Distributed and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (DISL) I'm involved in the study of Privacy-Invasive Software (PIS), loosely labelled spyware. The main research goal in this setting is to create a classification of PIS, and thereby investigate how PIS relate to both legitimate and traditionally malicious software. Another research goal is preventive mechanisms against PIS, which we argue need to be more user-oriented than traditional anti-virus like techniques.

We focus on the process of informing users about software implications as they are about to install new software on their system. One way forward is to use collaborative reputation systems (used by for instance IMDb.com) to store previous users' knowledge about software in a knowledge-base. This information is then used to present new users with up-to-date software reputations, i.e. providing information about both negative and positive consequences associated with software that they are about to install. Hopefully, users will reflect upon such information and thereby reach a more informed decision on weather to proceed with the installation or not.

We are also working on automatic analysis of the End-User License Agreements (EULA) that users must agree to before installing software. These EULAs includes clues about the implications associated with the software, but next to nobody read them since they are lengthy and hard to understand. Our research involves using machine learning techniques to automatically learn patterns that signify "good" and "bad" EULAs. These patterns can then be implemented into a decision-support-tool that automatically can classify previously unknown EULAs as being either good or bad.

Besides the research I also teach various security courses and supervise master theses. I'm also one of the administrators of our Security Laboratory where I'm involved in maintenance and development of this Unix environment. During my spare time I love photographing and some of my photos can be found at Boldtfoto.se (in Swedish).

Contact information is available here.