Simon S. Lam

Simon S. Lam is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who retired in 2018 from the University of Texas at Austin as professor emeritus and Regents Chair Emeritus in Computer Science. He made foundational contributions to transport layer security, inventing secure sockets in 1991, and with National Security Agency funding led a research group that in 1993 implemented the first secure sockets layer, Secure Network Programming, a new sublayer between the Internet's application and transport layers. Subsequent secure sockets layers, SSL and TLS, were later implemented using the architecture and key ideas first presented in SNP, enabling secure e-commerce on the World Wide Web; he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2023 for this work.