Dan Wallach is the Rice University computer scientist who, along with two of his his graduate students, discovered the security flaw in the Google search tool last week that could have allowed an attacker to search private data stored on personal computers.
In a computer security class, Professor Wallach and Rice graduate students Seth Nielson and Seth Fogarty discovered that an attack website could trick the Google program into believing it was communicating with the Google software and, in so doing, retrieve private data from PCs. Google disclosed the security problem over this past weekend and announced that it has begun distributing a new version of the search tool that repairs the security flaw.
Congratulations to Professor Wallach and his students for a job well done.