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Simon Lam

Professor Emeritus

Professor Simon Lam received his Ph.D. in 1974 from UCLA where he worked on the ARPANET. In 1977, he left IBM Research to join UTCS as an Assistant Professor, was promoted through the ranks, and retired in 2018. His most important research contribution to society is the invention of secure sockets and prototype implementation of the first secure sockets layer (SNP) in 1993 for Internet applications. This work was published and presented in the 1994 USENIX Summer Technical Conference. Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS), re-implemented several years later using key ideas first presented in SNP, enabled secure e-commerce on WWW and are now widely used to secure email and other Internet applications. For this contribution, Professor Lam and three students in his research project won the 2004 ACM Software System Award. He was elected to National Academy of Engineering in 2007.

Research

Research Areas:
Research Interests:
  • Computer network protocol design
  • Internet security services
  • Protocol verification
  • Performance analysis

Select Publications

Hongkun Yang, Simon S. Lam.Scalable Verification of Networks With Packet Transformers Using Atomic Predicates.IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 25, No. 5, October 2017. Pages 2900-2915.

Hongkun Yang, Simon S Lam.Real-time Verification of Network Properties using Atomic Predicates.IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Volume 24, No. 2, April 2016. Pages 887-900.

Simon S. Lam, Chen Qian.Geographic Routing in d-dimensional Spaces with Guaranteed Delivery and Low Stretch.IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2013. Pages 663-677.

Chung Kei Wong, Simon S Lam.Digital Signatures for Flows and Multicasts.IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 7, No. 4, August 1999. Pages 502-513.

Thomas Woo, Raghuram Bindignavle, Shaowen Su, Simon S. Lam.SNP: An Interface for Secure Network Programming.Proceedings USENIX '94 Summer Technical Conference, Boston, June 1994..

Awards & Honors

  • 2007 - Election to the National Academy of Engineering
  • 2007 - Teaching Excellence Award, College of Natural Sciences, UT-Austin
  • 2004 - ACM Software System Award
  • 2004 - ACM SIGCOMM Award for lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks
  • 2004 - W. Wallace McDowell Award, IEEE Computer Society
  • 2001 - William R. Bennett Prize, IEEE Communications Society
  • 1998 - ACM Fellow
  • 1985 - IEEE Fellow
  • 1975 - Leonard G. Abraham Prize, IEEE Communications Society

Contact Info

Simon Lam
Regents' Chair Emeritus in Computer Sciences #1
Homepage
(512) 471-9531
lam@cs.utexas.edu
GDC 6.418
CV