ROBERT Morris, a cryptographer who helped develop the Unix computer operating system that controls an increasing number of the world's computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, has died of complications from dementia in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He was 78.
Wizardly in his abilities and appearance - he had a scraggy grey beard - Morris was the digital gatekeeper of the United States government's computer secrets. An original thinker in the computer science world, he also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the US's first cyber war - the 1991 electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein's government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war.
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Although details are still classified, the attacks, along with laser-guided bombs, are believed to have largely destroyed Iraq's military command and control capability before the war began.Unix, which began as a research effort at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, became one of the world's leading operating systems, along with Microsoft's Windows.
Variations of the original Unix software, for example, now provide the foundation for Apple's iPhone iOS and Macintosh OSX as well as Google's Android operating systems.
As chief scientist of the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Centre, Morris gained unwanted national attention in 1988 after his son, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University, wrote a computer worm - a software program - that was able to propel itself through the internet, then a new entity.
Although it was intended to hide in the network as a bit of Kilroy-was-here digital graffiti, the program, dubbed the Morris worm, spread wildly out of control because of a design error, jamming more than 10 per cent of about 50,000 computers that made up the network at the time.
After realising his error, the younger Morris fled to his parents' home in Arnold, Maryland, before turning himself in to the FBI. He was convicted under an early federal computer crime law, sentenced to probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform community service. He later received a computer science doctorate at Harvard and is now a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science faculty.
Morris snr was born in Boston, the son of Helen and Walter, a salesman. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's in applied mathematics from Harvard.
At Bell Laboratories he initially worked on the design of specialised software tools known as compilers, which convert programmers' instructions into machine-readable language that can be directly executed by computers. Beginning in 1970, he worked with the Unix research group at Bell Laboratories, where he was a major contributor in both the numerical functions of the operating system and its security capabilities, including the password system and encryption functions.
His interest in computer security deepened in the late 1970s as he continued to explore cryptography, the study and practice of protecting information by converting it into code. With another researcher, he began working on an academic paper that unravelled an early German encryption device.
Before the paper could be published, he was called to the National Security Agency, where he was asked not to publish the paper because of what it might reveal about the vulnerabilities of modern cryptographic systems. He complied, and in 1986 went to work for the agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare.
Little is known about his classified work for the government, but Morris told a reporter that he sometimes helped the FBI decode encrypted evidence.
It is, however, known that at Bell Labs in New Jersey he helped design a computer for the US Navy that stalked Soviet and Chinese submarines by analysing data from sonar returns. It was the highest capacity computer built at the time. He also wrote a program called Sky that tracked astronomical bodies and predicted their positions at a given time. The program was so accurate that it was adopted by the US Naval Observatory.
Morris, who retired in 1994, is survived by his wife, Anne, two sons, a daughter and two grandchildren.
NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/obituaries/expert-on-the-dark-side-of-computer-science-in-cyber-wars-20110705-1h0r7.html#ixzz1RJQ7KO5N
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