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

Early life and education

Needham was born in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

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

Career and research

Among Needham's 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 Logical assertion, assertion, such as the Digital identity, identity of a computer system user. In contrast with iden ...

, generally known as the BAN logic. His Needham–Schroeder (co-invented with Michael Schroeder) security protocol forms the basis of the Kerberos

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. In 1962, he joined the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, serving as the Head of the Laboratory from 1980 until 1995. He was made a

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

in 1981 and remained with the laboratory until his retirement in 1998. Between 1996 and 1998, Needham served as the pro-vice chancellor at the University of Cambridge. In 1997, he set up

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's UK-based Research Laboratory. He was a founding

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of University College,

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, which became Wolfson College. Needham 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.

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 Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

in 2001. Needham held honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Twente, Loughborough University, and the University of Kent.

Named in Needham's honour

Needham has several awards named after him in his honour. The British Computer Society 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) 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''

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 1994 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Microsoft employees Deaths from cancer in England People from Sheffield People from South Cambridgeshire District