IS: Peter G. Neumann, Who Warned of Computer Security Risks, Dies at 93 (NYT Obit)

*For decades, he criticized the industry’s lax attitudes toward both
computer security and individual digital privacy. And he developed
solutions.*
EXCERPT:

In November 1952, a Harvard sophomore, Peter G. Neumann, had a two-hour
breakfast with Albert Einstein, in which they discussed the physicist’s
philosophy that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no
simpler.”


Einstein’s aphorism led to a lifelong romance with both the beauty and the
perils of complexity for Dr. Neumann, who went on to become one of the
nation’s leading computer security researchers.


Dr. Neumann died on Sunday at the Santa Clara Medical Center in Santa
Clara, Calif. He was still working full time on a Pentagon-supported
advanced computer security design, which is being adopted by companies such
as Google and Microsoft. He was 93.


The cause of death was complications from a recent fall, his daughter,
Helen Neumann, said.


Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist
and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since
1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer
industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.In 2010,
Mr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect
against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as
Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts
software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute.


An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a
building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their
holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy
or modify them.


Recently an industry organization known as the CHERI Alliance has begun to
commercialize the design for consumer products and industrial applications.


“Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to
the future,” said Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who
is the co-inventor of public key cryptography. “He describes himself as
having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his
graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware
designed to support security.”


Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for
Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of
emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an
avid following of hundreds of thousands.


Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer
failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195
issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became
the basis for his book, “Computer-Related Risks.”

[...]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/obituaries/peter-g-neumann-dead.html

<https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/obituaries/peter-g-neumann-dead.html>
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