Harold ”Bud” Lawson has been a leading pioneer in the computing and systems arenas. In this seminar he will share some of the significant highlights of his long career in the development and usage of computer technology including revealing several surprising details ”behind the scenes events” in the development of computing technology and the computer industry.

His experiences and reflections have been published in a chapter of the book Reflections on the History of Computing: Preserving Memories and Sharing Stories. Bud Lawson has lived and worked in Sweden for over 46 years where he has made several significant contributions to the industrial, military and academic sectors. His professional career began in 1959 under the leadership of the legendary Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper at Remington Rand Univac in Philadelphia. During his long career he participated in several pioneering developments in software, hardware, computer based systems and international standards. For his invention of the pointer variable concept in programming languages he was awarded the prestigious IEEE Charles Babbage Computer Pioneer award in 2000. He has also recieved the INCOSE System Engineering Pioneer award in 2016 for his life long contributions to the unification of Software and Systems Engineering.

Abstract  

The current Internet networking is based on TCP/IP protocol stack that had not changed significantly for 40 years. If the future Internet-of-things, smart cities and Industrial Internet would use the same model, the collapse is imminent due to widespread cybersecurity risks. The last year, we witnessed 1-Tbps Denial-of-Service attacks from hacked IoT devices, enough to take a small country out of the Internet.

A recent scanning study in Sweden revealed thousands of sensitive industrial devices connected and open for attacks. Securing current networks using firewalls, segmentation and Virtual Private Networks

(VPNs) is complex, costly and fragile. It requires plenty of manual configuration which is not sustainable in the long run. The root defect is the use of ephemeral identities such as IP and link addresses to define the policies. We describe a novel approach based on cryptographic host identities and Host Identity Protocol (HIP), a new standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). With help of centralized orchestration, it reduces network provisioning time, decreases costs, and reduces the attack surface to ”End of hacking as we know it”.

Identity-Defined Networking is a paradigm shift is cybersecurity which is gradually deployable to secure legacy and future networks.

Bio Andrei Gurtov

Andrei Gurtov received his M.Sc (2000) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is presently an Associate Professor in Linköping University, Sweden. He is also an adjunct professor at Aalto University, University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He visited the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley multiple times. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer and Vice Chair of IEEE Finland section. Andrei co-authored about 200 publications, including 4 books, 5 IETF RFCs, 6 IPRs, over 50 journal and 100 conference articles.

His standard-track RFCs are implemented by nearly all TCP/IP hosts. He co-chaired the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) Research Group at the Internet Research Task Force in 2006-2010. He supervised 12 PhD theses, serves as an editor of IEEE Internet of Things journal. According to ResearchGate, in winter 2017 Andrei was the most read and most cited researcher at IDA.