Department of Computer SciencesThe University of Texas at Austin
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin
Research activities of the laboratory span the entire development cycle of network protocols and security services, from design and specification, to verification, testing, performance analysis, implementation, and performance tuning. One of our achievements is the invention of secure sockets for securing Internet applications. In 1993, we designed and built the first secure sockets layer, named Secure Network Programming (SNP). In our USENIX paper (published and presented on June 8, 1994), we articulated the case for secure sockets as a high-level abstraction suitable for securing Internet applications and demonstrated the practicality of a secure sockets layer with performance measurement results. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL by Netscape and TLS by IETF), re-implemented several years later using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce between browsers and servers. (Netscape was founded as a company on April 4, 1994 to develop a browser.) Today, many Internet applications (including email) use HTTPS which consists of HTTP running over a secure sockets layer. For this contribution, we won the 2004 ACM Software System Award (past recipients).
Laboratory research projects are supervised by Simon S. Lam, Professor and Regents Chair in Computer Sciences. Research funding has been provided by National Science Foundation, NSA University Research Program, Texas Advanced Research Program, Office of Naval Research, ATT Foundation, and Lockheed.
Publications in
CV of Simon S. Lam