Dorothy Elizabeth Denning is an American information security researcher. She has published four books and 120 articles. At Georgetown University, she was a professor of computer science and director of the Science and Technology in International Affairs program. She is now a professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Denning has received several awards. Among them are the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, National Computer Systems Security Award, and the 2004 Harold F. Tipton Award "in recognition of her outstanding information security career". In 1995 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery .