Robert Morris (July 25, 1932 – June 26, 2011) was an American cryptographer and computer scientist. His name sometimes appears with a middle initial H that he adopted informally.
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Family and education
Morris was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris, a homemaker. Meredith Morris, and Benjamin Morris.
Bell Labs
From 1960 until 1986, Morris was a researcher at Bell Labs and worked on Multics and later Unix.
Using the TMG compiler-compiler, Morris, together with Doug McIlroy, developed the early implementation of the PL/I compiler called EPL for the Multics project. The pair also contributed a version of runoff text-formatting program for Multics.
Morris's contributions to early versions of Unix include the math library, the dc programming language, the program <code>crypt</code>, and the password encryption scheme used for user authentication. The encryption scheme (invented by Roger Needham), was based on using a trapdoor function (now called a key derivation function) to compute hashes of user passwords which were stored in the file <code>/etc/passwd</code>; analogous techniques, relying on different functions, are still in use today.
National Security Agency
In 1986, Morris began work at the National Security Agency (NSA). He once told a reporter that, while at the NSA, he helped the FBI decode encrypted evidence.
Robert Morris died in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
Selected publications
- (with Fred T. Grampp) UNIX Operating System Security, AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, 63, part 2, #8 (October 1984), pp. 1649–1672.
References
External links
- Dennis Ritchie: "Dabbling in the Cryptographic World" tells the story of cryptographic research he performed with Morris and why that research was never published.