Computer Scientist Inducted into Internet Hall of Fame
Simon Lam has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for creating the first secure sockets layer in 1993 for internet applications.
https://www.internethalloffame.org/inductee/tracy-laquey-parker/Simon Lam, a UT Austin professor emeritus of computer science, created the first secure sockets layer in 1993 for internet applications.
Simon Lam, a UT Austin professor emeritus of computer science, has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for his pioneering contributions to the security of internet applications. In 1991, he invented secure sockets. His work was then funded by a grant from the NSA University Research Program from June 1991 to June 1993. Lam and three graduate students implemented the first secure sockets layer in 1993, named Secure Network Programming (SNP). The SNP work was carried out when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy with just dozens of WWW servers around the world.
“SNP created a paradigm shift in security research for internet applications,” Lam, the Regents Chair Emeritus in Computer Science #1 and member of the National Academy of Engineering, wrote about his achievement. “Subsequent secure sockets layers — SSL and TLS, developed years later for commercial browsers — follow the same architecture and key ideas in SNP.”
Lam’s invention and its successors have allowed internet users to send private emails, buy a book online with a credit card, and download medical test results confidentially. Secure Network Programming won the ACM Software System Award in 2004.
Lam joins a fellow UT Austin faculty member who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013, Bob Metcalfe. Metcalfe was recognized for co-inventing and standardizing the Ethernet, most commonly used for connecting devices to a network, and making it commercially available.
Alumni of UT have also been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, including the late Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) director Robert Taylor (M.A., Psychology, ’59) who was inducted in 2013, and Tracy LaQuey Parker (B.A., Computer Science, ’86), who was inducted in 2017. The author of two of the first best-selling books about the internet, she also founded the UT Network Information Center, served as founding director for the UTeach Institute and is featured in the college WorldChangers series.
Update: This post was revised to include information about additional Longhorns in the Internet Hall of Fame.
