| Roger Needham | |
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Roger Needham in 1999
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| Born | 9 February 1935 Sheffield |
| Died | 1 March 2003 (aged 68) Willingham, Cambridgeshire |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge Microsoft |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | David Wheeler |
| Doctoral students | Ross Anderson David L. Tennenhouse Peter G. Gyarmati |
| Known for | BAN logic Tiny Encryption Algorithm XTEA |
| Notable awards | Commander of the Order of the British Empire |
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Wife: Karen Spärck Jones |
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Roger Michael Needham, CBE, FRS, FREng (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003)[1] was a British computer scientist.
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He attended Doncaster Grammar School for Boys in Doncaster (then in the West Riding).
Needham began his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in 1953, graduating with a B.A. in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy. His Ph.D. 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.
Among his theoretical contributions is the development of the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for authentication, generally known as the BAN logic. His Needham-Schroeder (coinvented with Michael Schroeder) security protocol forms the basis of the Kerberos authentication and key exchange system. He also codesigned the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms.
He joined Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, in 1962, became head of the laboratory in 1980, was made a professor in 1981 and remained with the laboratory until his retirement in 1995. Needham then set up Microsoft's UK-based Research Laboratory in 1997. He was also one of the founding Fellows 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.[2]
Needham married Karen Spärck Jones in 1958. Needham died of cancer in March 2003 at his home in Willingham, Cambridgeshire.
The British Computer Society, in 2004, established an annual Roger Needham Award in Needham's honour.[3] A £5000 prize is presented to an individual for making "a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD." The award is funded by Microsoft Research. The winner of the prize has an opportunity to give a public lecture. A list of previous recipients follows.[4]
A separate prize honoring Roger Needham has been established by EuroSys, the "EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award". This annual prize 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: