Simon S. Lam is an American computer scientist. He retired in 2018 from
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
as Professor Emeritus and Regents' Chair Emeritus in Computer Science #1. He made seminal and important contributions to
transport layer security
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...
, packet network verification, as well as network protocol design, verification, and performance analysis.
From 1991 to 1993, Simon Lam pioneered security for Internet applications. His most important research contribution to society is the invention of secure sockets and prototype implementation of the first secure sockets layer (named
SNP) for Internet applications. This work was done in 1993 when
WWW
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
was still in its infancy. SNP was published and presented at the 1994
USENIX Summer Technical Conference. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and
TLS), re-implemented several years later using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce on WWW and are widely used to secure email and many other Internet applications. For this contribution, Professor Lam and three graduate students in his research project won the 2004
ACM Software System Award
The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded by ...
. He was elected to the
United States National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...
in 2007.
Early life and education
Simon S. Lam was born in Macau (when it was a Portuguese colony) in 1947 with the family name 林 (Lam) and the given name 善成 (Sin Sing or Shin Sing). His family moved to Hong Kong in 1959. He received his secondary education from
La Salle College
La Salle College (LSC) (, Demonym: Lasallian) is a boys' secondary school in Hong Kong. It was established in 1932 by the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Roman Catholic religious teaching order founded by St. John Ba ...
, Kowloon, Hong Kong. He left Hong Kong in 1966 to study
Electrical Engineering
Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
at
Washington State University
Washington State University (Washington State, WSU, or informally Wazzu) is a public land-grant research university with its flagship, and oldest, campus in Pullman, Washington. Founded in 1890, WSU is also one of the oldest land-grant unive ...
on a scholarship. He received the BSEE degree with Distinction in 1969 from
Washington State University
Washington State University (Washington State, WSU, or informally Wazzu) is a public land-grant research university with its flagship, and oldest, campus in Pullman, Washington. Founded in 1890, WSU is also one of the oldest land-grant unive ...
and was honored by the College of Engineering as the 1969 Outstanding Senior in Electrical Engineering.
Beginning Fall 1969, he attended graduate school at the
UCLA School of Engineering
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, informally known as UCLA Samueli School of Engineering or UCLA Engineering, is the school of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It opened as the Colle ...
on a 4-year Chancellor’s Teaching Fellowship. His doctoral dissertation on packet switching in a multi-access broadcast channel was supervised by Professor
Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American computer scientist and a long-tenured professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.
In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theory ...
. From 1971 to 1974, he was a Postgraduate Research Engineer and later a Postdoctoral Scholar at the ARPA Network Measurement Center, UCLA, where he worked on the packet satellite project of
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
.
Career and professional service
From 1974 to 1977, he was a Research Staff Member at the IBM
T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York. In August 1977, he joined
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979, to Full Professor in 1983, appointed to the endowed David Bruton Jr. Centennial Professorship in 1985, and the Regents Chair in Computer Science #1 in 2001. He served as Department Chair from 1992 to 1994.
Professor Lam was active in professional service for the networking research communities of ACM
SIGCOMM,
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 operati ...
,
IEEE Communications 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 operation ...
, and
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...
. His most notable professional service contributions include the following: He co-founded the influential ACM
SIGCOMM Conference and, as its first Technical Program Chair, promoted and hosted the inaugural conference in 1983 on the campus of
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...
. The conference was a huge success attended by
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
,
CSNET The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be di ...
, and European packet network researchers as well as many other computer scientists and engineers interested in the emergent packet switched networking techniques, protocols, and architectures. Ten years later, in 1993, Professor Lam co-founded the International Conference on Network Protocols sponsored by
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 operati ...
. From 1994 to 1998, he was Editor-in-Chief of the
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
''IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering communication networks. It is published by the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Computer Society, and the ACM Special Interest Group on Data C ...
which was the first journal jointly published by
ACM and
IEEE
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 operation ...
.
Major awards
ACM SIGCOMM Award
Simon Lam received the 2004
ACM SIGCOMM Award The SIGCOMM Award recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks.
The award is presented in the annual SIGCOMM Technical Conference.
The awardees have been:
* 2022 Henning Schulzrinne
* 2021 Hari Balakrishnan
* 2020 Ami ...
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
Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...
."
National Academy of Engineering
In 2007, Simon Lam was elected to the
United States National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...
, 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
The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...
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.
[Thomas Y. C. Woo, Raghuram Bindignavle, Shaowen Su, and Simon S. Lam, /www.cs.utexas.edu/users/lam/Vita/Cpapers/WBSL94.pdf ''SNP: An interface for secure network programming,''Proceedings USENIX Summer Technical Conference, June 1994.]
SNP was designed as an application sublayer on top of transport-layer sockets. It provides to Internet applications a secure sockets
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
that closely resembles the sockets
API
An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...
. 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
The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded by ...
. Today's secure sockets layers (
SSL and
TLS) designed and deployed later by industry are widely used for securing transactions between
Web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
s and
servers for
e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
, as well as other Internet applications including
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
,
instant messaging
Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and trigge ...
, and
VoIP
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...
.
W. Wallace McDowell Award
He was awarded the 2004
W. Wallace McDowell Award
The W. Wallace McDowell Award is awarded by the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding theoretical, design, educational, practical, or related innovative contributions that fall within the scope of Computer Society interest. This is the highest tec ...
with the citation “For outstanding fundamental contributions in network protocols and security services.”
References
External links
Simon S. Lam homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lam, Simon S.
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Internet pioneers
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Fellow Members of the IEEE
University of Texas at Austin faculty
American computer scientists
Computer systems researchers
20th-century American scientists
21st-century American scientists
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Washington State University alumni
1947 births
Living people