Roger Needham
Roger Needham | |
|---|---|
 Roger Needham in 1999 | |
| Born | 9 February 1935 Sheffield, England, UK |
| Died | 1 March 2003 (aged 68) Willingham, Cambridgeshire, England, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Known for | Needham–Schroeder protocol BAN logic Tiny Encryption Algorithm XTEA |
| Spouse(s) | Karen Spärck Jones |
| Awards | Faraday Medal (1998) Commander of the Order of the British Empire |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge Microsoft |
| Thesis | The application of digital computers to problems of classification and grouping (1962) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Wheeler |
| Doctoral students | |
Roger Michael Needham, CBE, FRS, FREng (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003)[1] was a British computer scientist.
Early life[edit]
Roger Michael Needham was born in Birmingham, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, née Baker (c.1904–1976) and Leonard William Needham (c.1905–1973), a university chemistry lecturer.[2] He attended Doncaster Grammar School for Boys in Doncaster (then in the West Riding) going on to St John's College, Cambridge in 1953, and graduating with a BA in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy.[2] His PhD thesis was on applications of digital computers to the automatic classification and retrieval of documents. He worked on a variety of key computing projects in security, operating systems, computer architecture (capability systems) and local area networks.
Career[edit]
Among his theoretical contributions is the development of the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for authentication, generally known as the BAN logic. His Needham–Schroeder (co-invented with Michael Schroeder) security protocol forms the basis of the Kerberos authentication and key exchange system. He also co-designed the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms. He pioneered the technique of protecting passwords using a one-way hash function.[3][4]
In 1962 h3 joined the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, becoming Head of Laboratory in 1980. He was made a professor in 1981 and remained with the laboratory until his retirement in 1995. In 1997 he set up Microsoft's UK-based Research Laboratory. He was a founding Fellow of University College, Cambridge, which became Wolfson College.
Needham was elected to the Royal Society in 1985, became a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1993 and received a CBE for his contributions to computing in 2001. He also was a longtime and respected member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the University Grants Committee. He was made a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994.[5]
Needham held honorary doctorate degrees from University of Twente, Loughborough University, and University of Kent.
Personal life[edit]
Needham married fellow computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones in 1958. He died of cancer in March 2003 at his home in Willingham, Cambridgeshire.[6]
Roger Needham Award[edit]
The British Computer Society, in 2004, established an annual Roger Needham Award in his honour.[7]
EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award[edit]
EuroSys[8] established the annual Roger Needham PhD award in his honour.[9] It awards €2,000 to a PhD student from a European university whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the computer systems area. Past winners have been:
- 2018 Dennis Andriesse (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for his PhD thesis Analyzing and Securing Binaries Through Static Disassembly
- 2015 Cristiano Giuffrida (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for his PhD thesis Safe and Automatic Live Update
- 2014 Torvald Riegel (Technische Universitaet Dresden), for his thesis Software Transactional Memory Building Blocks
- 2013 Asia Slowinska (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for her PhD thesis Using Information Flow Tracking to Protect Legacy Binaries
- 2012 Derek Murray (University of Cambridge), for his thesis A Distributed Execution Engine Supporting Data-Dependent Control Flow
- 2011 Jorrit Herder (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for Building a Dependable Operating System: Fault Tolerance in MINIX 3
- 2010 Willem de Bruijn (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for Adaptive Operating System Design for High Throughput I/O
- 2009 Jacob Gorm Hansen (DIKU) for Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration
- 2008 Adam Dunkels (SICS) for Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems
- 2007 Nick Cook (Newcastle University) for Middleware Support for Non-repudiable Business-to-Business Interactions
- 2006 Oliver Heckmann (TU Darmstadt) for A System-oriented Approach to Efficiency and Quality of Service for Internet Service Providers
See also[edit]
- Andrew Herbert
- Maurice Wilkes (colleague)
- David Wheeler (colleague)
References[edit]
- ^ Hoare, T.; Wilkes, M. V. (2004). "Roger Michael Needham CBE FREng. 9 February 1935 - 1 March 2003: Elected F.R.S. 1985". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 50: 183–199. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2004.0014.
- ^ a b Herbert, Andrew James, "Needham, Roger Michael (1935–2003)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, March 2009; online edition, January 2007. Retrieved 27 August 2018 (subscription required)
- ^ Wilkes, M. V. Time-Sharing Computer Systems. American Elsevier, New York, (1968).
- ^ Schofield, Jack (10 March 2003). "Roger Needham". The Guardian.
- ^ "ACM Fellow Roger Needham Dies at 62". Pressroom. ACM. 7 March 2003.
- ^ Peterson, Kim (6 March 2003). "Microsoft's Needham dies from cancer". The Seattle Times. Retrieved 1 October 2012.
- ^ Roger Needham Lecture at the British Computer Society website
- ^ "European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS". www.eurosys.org. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
- ^ "phd-award - European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS". www.eurosys.org. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
External links[edit]
- Roger Needham at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Information about Roger Needham provided by his wife
- Obit: Roger Needham, The Register, 2 March 2003
- Roger Needham, Computer Security Expert, Dies at 68, The New York Times, 6 March 2003
- Speech presenting Needham with an honorary degree, Loughborough University, 13 July 2001
- 1935 births
- 2003 deaths
- Academics of the University of Cambridge
- Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
- British computer scientists
- Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
- Fellows of the British Computer Society
- Fellows of the Royal Society
- Fellows of University College, Cambridge
- Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge
- Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Microsoft employees
- Deaths from cancer in England
- People from Doncaster
- People from Sheffield
- People from South Cambridgeshire District
