Garfinkel's early research was in the field of optical storage. While he 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 Mozilla Thunderbird. It is believed that SBook was the first program 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 Broadband2Wireless, a wireless ISP, in 2000. The company went bankrupt in September 2001, and Garfinkel bought Vineyard.NET back from the bankruptcy court.

In 2003, Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat published an article 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, CA as an Associate Professor of Computer Science.

Books

• ( review by Peter G. Neumann and review by Eugene Spafford, in the RISKS Digest)
• ( review by Rob Slade in the RISKS Digest)
• ( review by Peter G. Neumann in the RISKS Digest)

Significant Academic Articles

Significant Journalistic Articles

• (Wired Magazine's cover article about HavenCo and Sealand)
• (an article about AOHell, re-published in the RISKS Digest)