Title:  Principles and Principals for Authorization

Speaker:  Fred B. Schneider

Date: 9/3/2010

Time: 9:30am

Location: TSRB Auditorium

Abstract

Ultimately, authorization should be based on the extent to which the principal making a request is trusted.  We will describe a language, logic, and mechanisms used for implementing this approach to authorization as well as some document-management applications. The roles of analytic, axiomatic, and constructive bases for trust will be discussed.

Biography

Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, where he has been on the faculty since 1978.  He also serves as Chief Scientist for the NSF "TRUST" Science and Technology Center, and he has been Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) since 1996.

Schneider's research concerns trustworthy systems, most recently focusing on computer security.  His early work was in formal methods and fault-tolerant distributed systems.  He is author of the graduate textbook "On Concurrent Programming", co-author (with David Gries) of
the undergraduate text "A Logical Approach to Discrete Math", and the editor of "Trust in Cyberspace" which reports findings from a US National Research Council's study committee on information systems trustworthiness that Schneider chaired.

A fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, Schneider was awarded a D.Sc. [honoris causa] from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003. His survey paper on state machine replication received a SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2007.

Schneider is a member of the board for the Computing Research Association and the council of the Computing Community Consortium.  He serves on the US congressionally mandated Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, as well as several other federal advisory boards.  A frequent consultant to industry, he co-chairs Microsoft's TCAAB advisory board on trustworthy computing, besides serving on the technical advisory board for Fortify Software.