Li Gong
More info
- Known for
- Java 2 security architecture, GNY logic
- Affiliation
- Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Mozilla
- Country
- China, United States
Java's security architect at Sun, who replaced the original all-or-nothing sandbox with fine-grained, policy-driven access control.
Gong did his PhD at Cambridge and in 1990, with Roger Needham and Raphael Yahalom, gave his initial to GNY logic, an extension of BAN logic for reasoning about authentication protocols. At Sun he led the security work behind JDK 1.2 (1998): instead of applets being either fully caged or fully trusted, it introduced protection domains, permissions declared in policy files, and an AccessController that inspects the whole call stack.
He documented the design in Inside Java 2 Platform Security (1999). He went on to lead Sun's JXTA peer-to-peer project, worked for Microsoft in China and then headed Mozilla's Chinese operation — an unusually wide arc from formal logic to the browser market.