Simon S. Lam

Simon Sin-Sing Lam (林善成) is Professor and Regents Chair in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. He was born in Macau in 1947. He received a B.S. with Distinction in Electrical Engineering from Washington State University in 1969, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from UCLA in 1970 and 1974, respectively.

ACM SIGCOMM Award

Simon Lam received the 2004 ACM SIGCOMM Award ^[1] for lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks with the citation "in recognition of his vision, breadth, and rigor in contributing to, among other areas: secure network communication, the analysis of network and multiaccess protocols, the analysis of queueing networks, and the design of mechanisms for quality of service."

National Academy of Engineering

In 2007, Simon Lam was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, ^[2] widely considered among the highest honors to be earned in the engineering and technology professions, for "contributions to computer network protocols and network security services.”

ACM Software System Award for Secure Network Programming

Simon Lam received a grant in 1991 from the NSA INFOSEC University Research Program for a project entitled, “Applying a Theory of Modules and Interfaces to Security Verification.” In this project, he led a research group that invented the concept of secure sockets for securing Internet applications (providing end-point authentication, data confidentiality, and data integrity). In 1993, they implemented the first secure sockets layer, named Secure Network Programming (SNP), with the goal of achieving “secure network programming for the masses.” They demonstrated SNP to the project’s NSA program managers. They presented the case for secure sockets and SNP performance results at the USENIX Summer Technical Conference, June 1994. ^[3] SNP was designed as an application sublayer on top of transport-layer sockets. It provides to Internet applications a secure sockets API that closely resembles the sockets API. The SNP approach was novel and a major change in the direction of network security research in 1993. This approach enabled secure e-commerce a few years later. SNP won the 2004 ACM Software System Award. ^[4] Today’s secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS) designed and deployed later by industry are widely used for securing transactions between Web browsers and servers for e-commerce, as well as other Internet applications including email, instant messaging, and VoIP.

W. Wallace McDowell Award

He was awarded the 2004 W. Wallace McDowell Award ^[5] with the citation “For outstanding fundamental contributions in network protocols and security services.”

External links

• Simon S. Lam

References