Butler W. Lampson
Lampson's 1971 paper on protection supplied influential conceptual models for access control. His broader systems work shows why security mechanisms must be understood as part of operating-system and distributed-system design.
Butler W. Lampson is a computer scientist whose career has included work at Berkeley, Xerox PARC, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Microsoft. His research spans operating systems, distributed computing, networking, security, and system design.
Protection and access control
In Protection (1971), Lampson described abstract models for mechanisms that control a program's access to system objects. The paper remains a frequently cited early treatment of access-control mechanisms.
Systems perspective
Lampson helped design systems including the SDS 940, the Xerox Alto environment, and security-related architectures. His work treats security as one of several system properties that must be engineered together with reliability, performance, and usability.
Timeline
- 1967Works on the SDS 940 time-sharing system.
- 1971Publishes Protection, a foundational paper on access-control mechanisms.
- 1992Receives the ACM A.M. Turing Award.
- 2004Receives the IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
Butler W. Lampson
- Type
- Person
- Era
- 1960s-Present
- Known for
- Protection (1971); Distributed systems and operating systems; ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Tags
- computer-security, operating-systems, access-control, distributed-systems, research
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