Roger Michael Needham

Roger Michael Needham, CBE, FRS, FREng (9 February 1935 – 1 March 2003) was a British computer scientist.

Needham began his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in 1953, graduating with a B.A. in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy. His Ph.D. thesis was on applications of digital computers to the automatic classification and retrieval of documents. He worked on a variety of key computing projects in security, operating systems, computer architecture (capability systems) and local area networks.

Among his theoretical contributions is the development of the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for authentication, generally known as the BAN logic. His Needham-Schroeder (coinvented with Michael Schroeder) security protocol forms the basis of the Kerberos authentication and key exchange system. He also codesigned the TEA and XTEA encryption algorithms.

He joined Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, in 1962, became head of the laboratory in 1980, was made a professor in 1981 and remained with the laboratory until his retirement in 1995. Needham then set up Microsoft's UK-based Research Laboratory in 1997. He was also one of the founding Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Needham was elected to the Royal Society in 1985, became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1993 and received a CBE for his contributions to computing in 2001. He also was a longtime and respected member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. He was made a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994. Needham was married to Karen Spärck Jones.

Roger Needham died in March 2003 at his home in Willingham, Cambridgeshire.

The British Computer Society, in 2004, established an annual Roger Needham Award in Needham's honour. A £5000 prize is presented to an individual for making "a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD." The award is funded by Microsoft Research. The winner of the prize has an opportunity to give a public lecture