Peter G. Neumann

A leading specialist in computer security best known for the Provably Secure Operating System (PSOS), Neumann has also served as moderator of the RISKS Digest and founding editor of ACM Software Engineering Notes (SEN).

He studied at Harvard University (1950–1958), gaining a Ph.D. in 1961 after a Fulbright scholarship in Germany (1958–1960). Neumann also holds a Doctorate from Darmstadt, and has taught at Darmstadt, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and the University of Maryland.

While at Harvard, he was one of the first programmers to have solo access to his own "personal" computer — at least on weekends. The Mark IV was one of the world's first stored-program computers, and in 1954 he earned the trust of its designer, Howard Aiken. Every Friday at 5 p.m., he would take over care of the machine from its regular operators, have the run of the system for the weekend, and would not leave until Monday morning. He is quoted as saying, "I was the operator, maintainer and guru."

His undergraduate thesis was on computing elliptic integrals, and he used the machine to generate a large number of tables. Neumann also used the Mark IV to do early work in computer music. For a course on computational linguistics, he and other students used a statistical technique to analyze 37 hymn tunes and then create 600 new tunes based on the patterns they discovered.

After 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the 1960s — during which he was heavily involved in the Multics development jointly with MIT and Honeywell — Neumann joined SRI's Computer Science Lab in September 1971, where he occupied the same office for four decades. He has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past.

He founded The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM SIGSOFT), which focused on issues related to all aspects of software development and maintenance, with emphasis on requirements, specification and design, software architecture, validation, verification, debugging, software safety, software processes, software management, measurement, user interfaces, configuration management, software engineering environments, and CASE tools. He was a member of the ACCURATE project and has co-founded People for Internet Responsibility (PFIR, http://www.PFIR.org). Early on, he predicted that the security flaws accompanying the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences. He is known for his publication, Computer-Related Risks, Addison-Wesley/ACM Press, ISBN 0-201-55805-X, 1995. Neumann is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS.