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ACM Honors
Inventors of Landmark Software
Concept
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ACM
has given the 2004
Software System Award to Secure Network
Programming (SNP), the first secure sockets
layer for Internet applications, aimed at
achieving secure network programming for
widespread use. SNP was designed and implemented
by Raghuram Bindignavle, Simon Lam, Shaowen Su,
and Thomas Y.C. Woo in 1993, while at the
University of Texas at Austin Networking
Research Laboratory. Their work was funded by
the National Security Agency and the National
Science Foundation. The Software System Award is
given to an institution or individual(s)
recognized for developing software systems that
have had a lasting influence, reflected in
contributions to concepts and/or commercial
acceptance. This award carries a $10,000 prize,
and financial support for the award is provided
by IBM.
The recipients invented secure
sockets as a high-level approach to securing
Internet applications. In 1993, they designed
and prototyped the first secure sockets layer,
named SNP, which provides a user interface
closely resembling sockets. Their goal was to
enable existing socket programs to be
retrofitted with appropriate security measures
with only minor modifications. SNP also
encapsulates security-sensitive information,
which prevents accidental or intentional
disclosure by an application
program.
Many of the design choices in
SNP can be found in today's secure sockets
layers used between browsers and Internet
servers. For example, the secure sockets layer
SSL, later designed and built by Netscape, is
widely used for securing communications between
browsers and servers, as well as other Internet
applications.
Raghuram Bindignavle is a
consultant on Linux-based and wireless
technologies of use to large swaths of rural
India that are not covered by traditional land
lines. Prior to returning to India, he worked in
various software companies in the US. He
received a B.E. degree in Computer Science at
the Regional Engineering College of the
University of Allahabad in India. He earned an
M.A. degree in Computer Science from the
University of Texas at Austin.
Simon S.
Lam is Professor and Regents Chair in Computer
Sciences, and Director of the Networking
Research Laboratory at the University of Texas
at Austin, where he has been on the faculty
since 1977. He served as department chair from
1992 to 1994. He received a B.S.E.E. degree from
Washington State University, and M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in engineering from UCLA. From 1971 to
1974, he was a Postgraduate Research Engineer at
UCLA's ARPA Network Measurement Center. From
1974 to 1977, he was a Research Staff Member at
the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He served
as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking from 1995 to
1999. An ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow, Dr. Lam
received the 2004 W. Wallace McDowell Award from
the IEEE Computer Society and the 2004 ACM
SIGCOMM Award. He is a co-recipient of the
1975 Leonard G. Abraham Prize and the 2001
William R. Bennett Prize from IEEE
Communications Society.
Shaowen Su is
Managing Director of Zero2ipo Ltd., a financial
advisory services and investment management firm
in China. From 2003 to 2004, he was CFO of
Todaytech Asia Ltd. in Hong Kong. Mr. Su was
General Manager of China Operations at ACR
Ventures, a Hong Kong-based venture capital
company, and was selected as one of the "most
active VCs of the year" in 2001 by Digital
Fortune magazine. His experience includes
software development and marketing in the US
with National Instruments, Intel, and NEC. Mr.
Su received a Bachelor of Physics degree from
Peking University and an M.S. in Computer
Science from University of Texas at Austin.
Thomas Y.C. Woo, a Director at Bell
Labs, heads the Mobile Networking and Internet
Management Research Laboratory. He previously
headed the Bell Labs Networking Systems Research
Department. In between, he spent two years at
RedWave Networks, a Silicon Valley startup, as
Chief Network Architect and Vice President of
Software Engineering. Woo has received more than
10 U.S. patents, and has served on the program
committee of ACM
SIGCOMM. He is an Editor of IEEE
Wireless Communications and was an adjunct
faculty member at the University of
Pennsylvania. He received a B.Sc. degree in
Computer Science (First Class Honor) from the
University of Hong Kong, and M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in Computer Science from the University
of Texas at Austin.
ACM will present
these and other awards at the annual ACM
Awards Banquet on June 11, 2005, in San
Francisco.
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