Roger Michael Needham (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003) was a British

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

Early life and education

Needham was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...

, England, the only child of Phyllis Mary, ''née'' Baker (''c''.1904–1976) and Leonard William Needham (''c''.1905–1973), a university chemistry lecturer. 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. 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 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 Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social ...

, operating systems, computer architecture (capability systems) and local area networks.

Career and research

Among his theoretical contributions is the development of the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for

authentication Authentication (from ''authentikos'', "real, genuine", from αὐθέντης ''authentes'', "author") is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicati ...

, generally known as the

BAN logic Ban, or BAN, may refer to: Law * Ban (law), a decree that prohibits something, sometimes a form of censorship, being denied from entering or using the place/item ** Imperial ban (''Reichsacht''), a form of outlawry in the medieval Holy Roman ...

. His Needham–Schroeder (co-invented with

Michael Schroeder Michael Schroeder (born 1945) is an American computer scientist. His areas of research include computer security, distributed systems and operating systems and he is perhaps best known as the co-inventor of the Needham–Schroeder protocol. In ...

)

security protocol A security protocol (cryptographic protocol or encryption protocol) is an abstract or concrete protocol that performs a security-related function and applies cryptographic methods, often as sequences of cryptographic primitives. A protocol descri ...

forms the basis of the Kerberos

and key exchange system. He also co-designed the

TEA Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of ''Camellia sinensis'', an evergreen shrub native to East Asia which probably originated in the borderlands of southwestern China and norther ...

and XTEA encryption algorithms. He pioneered the technique of protecting passwords using a one-way hash function. In 1962 he joined the University of Cambridge's

Computer Laboratory A computer lab is a space where computer services are provided to a defined community. These are typically public libraries and academic institutions. Generally, users must follow a certain user policy to retain access to the computers. This us ...

, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, becoming Head of Laboratory in 1980. He was made a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

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 Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge becam ...

, which became Wolfson College. Needham was a longtime and respected member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the

IEEE Computer Society The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operatio ...

Technical Committee on Security and Privacy and the University Grants Committee. He was made a fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

in 1994.

Awards and honours

Needham was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1985, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 1993. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his contributions to computing in 2001. Needham held honorary doctorate degrees from University of Twente, Loughborough University, and

University of Kent , motto_lang = , mottoeng = Literal translation: 'Whom to serve is to reign'(Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')Graham Martin, ''From Vision to Reality: the Making of the University of Kent at Canterbury'' ...

Named in Needhams honour

Needham has several awards named after him in his honour. The

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

established an annual Roger Needham Award in 2004. The European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) established the annual ''Roger Needham PhD award''. 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: * 2021 Victor van de Veen, ( Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) * 2020 Michael Schwarz, Graz University of Technology for his PhD thesis ''Software-based Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses in Restricted Environments'' * 2019 Manolis Karpathiotakis, EPFL * 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, for his thesis ''A Distributed Execution Engine Supporting Data-Dependent Control Flow'' * 2011 Jorrit Herder 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 The UCPH Department of Computer Science ( da, Datalogisk Institut, DIKU) is a department in the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It is the longest established department of Computer Science in Denmark and was founded in ...

) for ''Virtual Machine Mobility with Self-Migration'' * 2008

Adam Dunkels Adam Dunkels (born 1978) is a Swedish computer scientist, computer programmer, entrepreneur, and founder of Thingsquare, an Internet of things (IoT) product development business. His father was professor of mathematics Andrejs Dunkels. His mot ...

(

SICS RISE SICS (previously Swedish Institute of Computer Science) is a leading research institute for applied information and communication technology in Sweden, founded in 1985. It explores the digitalization of products, services and businesses. In ...

) 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''

Personal life

Needham married fellow computer scientist Karen Spärck Jones in 1958. He died of cancer in March 2003 at his home in Willingham, Cambridgeshire.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Needham, Roger 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 South Cambridgeshire District