Anderson's research interests are in security, cryptology, dependability and technology policy. In cryptography, he designed with Eli Biham the BEAR, LION and Tigercryptographic primitives, and co-wrote with Biham and Lars Knudsen the block cipherSerpent, one of the finalists in the Advanced Encryption Standard competition. He has also discovered weaknesses in the FISH cipher and designed the stream cipher Pike. Anderson has always campaigned for computer security to be studied in a wider social context. Many of his writings emphasise the human, social, and political dimension of security. On online voting, for example, he writes "When you move from voting in person to voting at home it vastly expands the scope for vote buying and coercion”, making the point that it's not just a question of whether the encryption can be cracked. In 1998, Anderson founded the Foundation for Information Policy Research, a think tank and lobbying group on information-technology policy. Anderson is also a founder of the UK-Crypto mailing list and the economics of security research domain. He is well-known among Cambridge academics as an outspoken defender of academic freedoms, intellectual property and other matters of university politics. He is engaged in the ″Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms″ and has been an elected member of Cambridge University Council since 2002. In January 2004, the student newspaper Varsity declared Anderson to be Cambridge University's "most powerful person". In 2002, he became an outspoken critic of trusted computing proposals, in particular Microsoft's Palladium operating system vision. Anderson's TCPA FAQ has been characterised by IBM TC researcher David R. Safford as "full of technical errors" and of "presenting speculation as fact." For years Anderson has been arguing that by their nature large databases will never be free of abuse by breaches of security. He has said that if a large system is designed for ease of access it becomes insecure; if made watertight it becomes impossible to use. This is sometimes known as Anderson's Rule. Anderson is the author of Security Engineering, published by Wiley in 2001. He was the founder and editor of Computer and Communications Security Reviews. After the vast Global surveillance disclosure leaked by Edward Snowden beginning in June 2013 Anderson suggested one way to begin stamping out the British state's unaccountable involvement in this NSA spying scandal is to entirely end the domestic secret services. Anderson: “Were I a legislator, I would simply abolish MI5." Anderson notes the only way this kind of systemic data collection has been made possible was through the business models of private industry. The value of information-driven web companies such as Facebook and Google is built around their ability to gather vast tracts of data. It was something the intelligence agencies would have struggled with alone. Anderson is a critic of smart meters, writing that there are various privacy and energy security concerns.
