Garfinkel's early research was in the field of optical storage. While he was an undergraduate at the MIT Media Laboratory, Garfinkel developed CDFS, the first file system for write-once optical disk systems. During the summer of 1987, he worked at Brown University's IRIS Project, where he developed a server allowing CDROMs to be shared over a network simultaneously by multiple workstations. In 1991, while a senior editor at NeXTWORLD magazine, Garfinkel created an address book program for the NeXT Computer called SBook. One of SBook's most popular features was a search field that performed a full-text search of all of the records in the address book with each keypress. This kind of search is now standard on many computer programs, including Apple's Mail application and MozillaThunderbird. SBook was one of the first programs to incorporate this kind of search technology. In 1995, Garfinkel moved to Martha's Vineyard and started Vineyard.NET, the Vineyard's first Internet Service Provider. Vineyard.NET was bought by , a wireless ISP, in 2000. The company went bankrupt in September 2001, and Garfinkel bought Vineyard.NET back from the bankruptcy court. In 1998, Garfinkel founded Sandstorm Enterprises, a computer security firm that developed advanced computer forensic tools used by businesses and governments to audit their systems. Sandstorm was acquired by in 2010. Garfinkel is the inventor of six patents, mostly in the field of computer security. In 2003, Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat published in IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine reporting on an experiment in which they purchased 158 used hard drives from a variety of sources and checked to see whether they still contained readable data. Roughly one third of the drives appeared to have information that was highly confidential and should have been erased prior to the drive's resale. In 2006, Garfinkel introduced cross-drive analysis, an unsupervised machine learning algorithm for automatically reconstructing social networks from hard drives and other kinds of data-carrying devices that are likely to contain pseudo-unique information. In September 2006, Garfinkel joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, as an associate professor of Computer Science. He moved to Arlington, Virginia, in June 2010 to help NPS with its research aims in the National Capital Region. He transitioned to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in January 2015, and to the US Census Bureau in 2017. A common theme throughout Garfinkel's research is introduction of the scientific method to digital forensics.
Garfinkel is the author or co-author of 16 books, and the author of more than a thousand articles. He is a contributing writer for Technology Review and has written as a freelancer for many publications including Wired magazine, The Boston Globe, Privacy Journal, and CSO Magazine. His work for CSO Magazine earned him five regional and national journalism awards, including the Jesse H. Neal Business Journalism Awards in 2003 and 2004. Garfinkel is also the editor of
Books
The Computer Book: From the Abacus to Artificial Intelligence, 250 Milestones in the History of Computer Science, by Simson L. Garfinkel and Rachel H. Grunspan. 2018
Usable Security: History, Themes, and Challenges], by Simson Garfinkel and Heather Lipford, 2014.
Web Security, Privacy and Commerce, with Gene Spafford. 2001.
