IEEE Remembers Pioneering Computer Scientist Peter G. Neumann

The computing community recently lost one of its enduring voices: IEEE Fellow Peter G. Neumann. The renowned computer scientist and respected risk analyst died on 17 May at the age of 93. For almost 70 years, Neumann shaped the computing field through his pioneering work on risks, system dependability, security, and fault tolerance with rare intellectual depth and unwavering ethical clarity. Five of those decades were spent as a principal scientist at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., where he worked until his death. A detailed narrative of his work, life, and mentoring is available on his SRI web page, where he chronicled his journey. He possessed a rare ability to identify systemic vulnerabilities long before they became widely recognized. He cautioned that interconnected systems, if poorly designed or insufficiently scrutinized, could fail and become targets for exploitation. He insisted innovation always must be accompanied by responsibility, reliability, and a clear understanding of the risks involved. With the widespread adoption of computing, information technology, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems, Neumann’s insights have become more relevant. From Harvard to Bell Labs Neumann was born on 21 September 1932 in New York City. After graduating from high school, he pursued a degree in mathematics at Harvard, where he had a conversation that shaped his approach to research, according to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In November 1952 he had a two-hour breakfast meeting with Albert Einstein, at which they discussed the importance of simplicity in design. Neumann was among the first generation of Harvard students to program computers and, remarkably for that era, enjoyed exclusive access to the computing systems. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1954, he continued his education at Harvard, earning a master’s degree in 1955. In 1958 he moved to Germany to become a doctoral student at the Technical University of Darmstadt as part of the Fulbright program, which provides funding for U.S. citizens to study or teach abroad. He earned his doctorate in 1960. After returning to the United States, he joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., where he worked on error-correcting codes and survivable communications. He also pursued a second Ph.D. in applied mathematics and science at Harvard, achieving that goal in 1961. Four years later, he was assigned to work on Multics, which became an influential operating system that shaped modern secure computing architectures. Multics was a mainframe time-sharing system designed to serve the diverse needs of multiple users simultaneously. Neumann designed its filing system, which featured hierarchical directories, access control lists, and dynamically paged virtual memory segments. He also played a key role in the design of its input/output system. In 1970 he left Bell Labs to join SRI. Technical contributions at SRI Neumann made several seminal and foundational technical contributions while at SRI, including the following: Provably Secure Operating System. The PSOS project he worked on advanced formal methods in operating systems and computer security. The project demonstrated that security could be designed within the initial plan rather than retrofitted. Election integrity and voting systems. He outlined vulnerabilities in electronic systems and advocated for transparency, verifiability, and public accountability. Systems-level risk thinking. He broadened the concept of computer security to encompass human factors, governance, policy failures, social consequences, organizational negligence, and misuse of automation. His system-level perspective now fuels debates on AI governance and digital trust. Intrusion-detection systems. With his colleague Dorothy E. Denning, a security expert, he helped develop an intrusion-detection expert system (IDES), laying the groundwork for modern cyberdefenses. CHERI. He promoted hardware-assisted secure computing: technology that now influences next-generation processors. The Capability Hardware-Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI) architecture project, which Neumann led, is now being commercialized by an international, nonprofit alliance. His contributions are united by a simple but profound principle: Security should be foundational, not incidental. Neumann argued that security must be embedded into system architecture from the start—not patched after deployment. ACM’s Risks Forum Neumann’s other enduring contribution was the creation and stewardship of the ACM Risks Forum, formally known as the Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems. For decades, it was one of the most respected online arenas for critical reflection on computing failures, vulnerabilities, security breaches, unintended consequences, and emerging technological threats. He transformed the forum into a scholarly archive of cautionary lessons in computing failures and risks. In 1985 he started documenting how techn

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