Robert Morris (cryptographer)
The Bell Labs mathematician who designed Unix password protection, then became chief scientist at the NSA – and whose son released the Morris worm.
Robert Morris (1932–2011) joined Bell Labs in 1960 and wrote a good share of early Unix's maths and utility code, including the dc calculator with Lorinda Cherry. In 1979 he and Ken Thompson published Password Security: A Case History, explaining why Unix stopped storing passwords in the clear and instead ran them through a deliberately slow, salted function – the template every password-hashing scheme has followed since.
In 1986 he moved to the NSA as chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center. Two years later his son, Robert Tappan Morris, knocked over a large part of the internet with his worm, giving the family dinner table an unusual degree of professional overlap. He is also remembered for his three rules of computer security: do not own a computer, do not power it on, and do not use it.