James P. Anderson Jr.

James P. Anderson Jr. (1930 – November 18, 2007) was an American computer scientist regarded as one of the founding figures of information security. He is generally credited with the invention and explication of the reference monitor concept and the formulation of audit trail-based intrusion detection (1980), two ideas that became foundational to the modern discipline of computer security.

Early life and education Anderson was born in Easton, Pennsylvania and graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a degree in meteorology. From 1953 to 1956, he served in the United States Navy as a gunnery officer and later as a radio officer; his time as a radio officer first drew him into the study of cryptography and information security. The D-825 was first delivered to the United States Naval Research Laboratory under the military designation AN/GYK-3(V) and was also used in the AN/GSA-51 BUIC II air-defense system. Through that firm, he became a long-standing consultant to computer manufacturers, defense and intelligence agencies, and telecommunications carriers. The study panel included Daniel J. Edwards of the National Security Agency, Steven Lipner of The MITRE Corporation, and Clark Weissman of the System Development Corporation, among others.

The report introduced the reference monitor concept, an abstract mechanism that mediates every access by a subject to an object in a system, as the basis for building demonstrably secure operating systems. The report's reference monitor formulation directly shaped later security kernel architectures, the Bell–LaPadula model, and the U.S. Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC, the "Orange Book"). The taxonomy of insider and outsider attackers introduced in the report, including external penetrators, internal masqueraders, and misfeasors, is still cited in modern intrusion-detection literature.

Anderson's 1980 report directly inspired Dorothy E. Denning and Peter G. Neumann's work at SRI International in 1984–1986, which produced the first real-time Intrusion Detection Expert System (IDES), and through it the entire family of host-based and network-based intrusion-detection systems developed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Other government work Anderson contributed to a number of other seminal U.S. government information security standards and policies, including the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria (TCSEC, the Orange Book), the BLACKER secure-networking program, the Trusted Network Interpretation (TNI), and other volumes in the National Computer Security Center's Rainbow Series.

Awards and recognition In 1990, Anderson received the National Computer Systems Security Award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Computer Security Center (then part of the National Security Agency). He was the third recipient of the award, following Stephen T. Walker (1988) and Willis Ware (1989), and preceded Roger Schell (1991), Dorothy E. Denning (1999), and Eugene H. Spafford (2000).

Selected works