Robert N. M. Watson
The FreeBSD developer whose sandboxing ideas ended up inside Apple's operating systems, and whose hardware research aims to make memory bugs impossible at the processor level.
Watson started TrustedBSD around 2000 and wrote FreeBSD's mandatory access control framework. Apple carried it into Mac OS X, where it became the foundation of the sandbox that now confines every iOS app. In 2010 came Capsicum, with Jonathan Anderson, Ben Laurie and Kris Kennaway: capabilities for the Unix kernel that let a program voluntarily throw away its privileges and keep only the file descriptors it actually needs.
At Cambridge, together with Peter Neumann and SRI, he leads CHERI — a processor architecture in which pointers carry their own bounds and permissions in hardware. Arm built a prototype chip on the idea, Morello, in 2022. If it catches on, a buffer overflow becomes a crash rather than a break-in.