Simon S. Lam

Simon S. Lam is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He retired in 2018 from The University of Texas at Austin as Professor Emeritus and Regents' Chair Emeritus in Computer Science #1. He made seminal and important contributions to transport layer security, packet network verification, as well as network protocol design, verification, and performance analysis.

Simon Lam pioneered security for Internet applications - for example, one result of his work that is visible to most users as the "s" in https, signifying a secure connection. He invented secure sockets in 1991. In 1993, he invented the Secure Network Programming (SNP) application programming interface (API) which explored the approach of having a secure transport layer API closely resembling Berkeley sockets, to facilitate retrofitting pre-existing network applications with security measures. This work was done when WWW was still in its infancy. SNP was published and presented on June 8, 1994 at the USENIX Summer Technical Conference. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS) re-implemented several years later using the architecture and key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce on WWW (e.g., banking, shopping). TLS is also 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. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering in 2007. For inventing secure sockets and implementing the first secure sockets layer, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2023. Provided by Wikipedia