Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93

For decades, he criticized the industry’s lax attitudes toward both computer security and individual digital privacy. And he developed solutions.

In November 1952, a Harvard sophomore, Peter G. Neumann, had a two-hour breakfast with Albert Einstein, in which they discussed the physicist’s philosophy that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Einstein’s aphorism led to a lifelong romance with both the beauty and the perils of complexity for Dr. Neumann, who went on to become one of the nation’s leading computer security researchers.

Dr. Neumann died on Sunday at the Santa Clara Medical Center in Santa Clara, Calif. He was still working full time on a Pentagon-supported advanced computer security design, which is being adopted by companies such as Google and Microsoft. He was 93.

The cause of death was complications from a recent fall, his daughter, Helen Neumann, said.

Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.

In 2010, Mr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute.

An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them.

Recently an industry organization known as the CHERI Alliance has begun to commercialize the design for consumer products and industrial applications.

“Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to the future,” said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. “He describes himself as having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware designed to support security.”

- Author: John Markoff, The New York Times

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