Phillip Hallam-Baker

Phillip Hallam-Baker is a computer scientist, mostly known for contributions to Internet security, since the design of HTTP at CERN in 1992. Self-employed since 2018 as a consultant and expert witness in court cases, he previously worked at Comodo, Verisign, and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a frequent participant in IETF meetings and discussions, and has written a number of RFCs.

He introduced the misspelling of referrer in the original proposal to incorporate the "Referer" header field into the HTTP specification. In 2007 he authored the dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime; Ron Rivest used it as a source of project ideas for his course on Computer and Network Security at MIT in 2013.

Biography Hallam-Baker has a degree in electronic engineering from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton and a doctorate in Computer Science from the Nuclear Physics Department at Oxford University. He was appointed a Post Doctoral Research Associate at DESY in 1992 and CERN Fellow in 1993.

Hallam-Baker worked with the Clinton-Gore ’92 Internet campaign. While at the MIT Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence, he worked on developing a security plan and performed work on securing high-profile federal government internet sites.

IETF Contributions

with J. Franks, J. Hostetler, P. Leach, A. Luotonen, E. Sink, L. Stewart, An Extension to HTTP : Digest Access Authentication with J. Franks, J. Hostetler, S. Lawrence, P. Leach, A. Luotonen, L. Stewart, HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication with S. Boeyen, Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Repository Locator Service with T. Hansen, D. Crocker, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Service Overview with T. Hansen, E. Siegel, D. Crocker, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Development, Deployment, and Operations with S. Santesson, Online Certificate Status Protocol Algorithm Agility with R. Stradling, DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) Resource Record with S. Farrell, D. Kutscher, C. Dannewitz, B. Ohlman, A. Keranen, Naming Things with Hashes