SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES

Dr. Butler Lampson
Architect
Microsoft Corporation
and
Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Computer Security in the Real World

Thursday, 13 November 1997

4:00 pm, Wean Hall 7500

3:45 pm - Refreshments Outside Wean Hall 7500


ABSTRACT
What people want from computer security is to be as secure with computers as they are in the real world. Real-world security is about value, locks, and police. When it works, you get good enough locks (not too many break-ins), good enough policy (so break-ins aren't a paying business), and minimum interference with daily life. Computer security is hard because people don't trust new things (especially when they don't understand them), and computers are fast and complicated. The kind of computer break-ins most people care about are vandalism or sabotage that damages information or disrupts service, theft of money or information, and loss of pirvacy. Some people think that because computers are precise, perfect computer security should be possible. I'll explain why this is wrong, and talk about what kind of security is practical and how to get it.

SPEAKER BIO
Butler Lampson is an Architect at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT. He was on the faculty at Berkeley, at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC, and at Digital's Systems Research Center. He has worked on computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, remote procedure call, programming languages and their semantics, programming in the large, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, and WHSIWYG editors. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distributed computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, and several programming languages. He received an AB from Harvard University, a PhD in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, and honorary ScD's from the Eidgenoessische Techniche Hochschule, Zurich and the University of Bologna. He holds a number of patents on networks, security, raster printing, and transaction processing. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the ACM's Software Systems Award in 1984 for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer award in 1996, and the Turing Award in 1992.

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