Jon Postel

Jonathan Bruce Postel was an American computer scientist who worked on the ARPANET as a UCLA graduate student and spent most of his career at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. He edited the Request for Comments series from 1969 until his death, and personally administered the assignment of Internet numbers and names, a function that became known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.

The robustness principle

In RFC 761 (1980) Postel wrote that an implementation should "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." The principle became known as Postel's law; later security practitioners have debated its consequences, since liberal parsing of malformed input is a recurring source of vulnerabilities.

The 1998 root server test

In January 1998, during a dispute over control of the DNS root, Postel directed eight of the twelve non-government root server operators to take zone updates from his ISI server rather than the Network Solutions server. The test was reversed after government objection and became a reference point in the creation of ICANN later that year. Postel died in October 1998 following heart surgery; RFC 2468, "I Remember IANA," was written by Vint Cerf in his memory.

Timeline

• 1943-08-06Born in Altadena, California.
• 1969Begins editing the Request for Comments (RFC) series.
• 1980States the robustness principle in RFC 761.
• 1998-01Redirects most root servers to ISI in a DNS root test that is quickly reversed.
• 1998-10-16Dies in Los Angeles after heart surgery.