David D. Clark
More info
- Organization
- MIT
- Known for
- Chief protocol architect of the Internet 1981–1989, Clark–Wilson model
The MIT researcher who was the internet's chief architect in the 1980s and showed that banks need a different security model from the military.
Clark was chief protocol architect of the internet from 1981 to 1989 and chaired the Internet Activities Board. With Jerome Saltzer and David Reed he wrote the end-to-end arguments paper, which explains why TCP/IP puts the intelligence at the endpoints and keeps the network dumb. He is also the man behind the 1992 line "We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."
In 1987 he and the accountant David Wilson published the Clark–Wilson model. Where Bell–LaPadula protects secrets, Clark–Wilson protects the books: data may only change through well-formed transactions, and duties are separated so nobody can both make and approve a change. In short, it took double-entry bookkeeping's checks and turned them into computer science.