Virgil Gligor

In the early 1980s, when security mostly meant confidentiality and integrity, Gligor argued that availability was a problem in its own right. His paper on denial of service in operating systems (IEEE TSE, 1984) showed how one process can starve others without ever reading anything it isn't allowed to – and why access control alone therefore isn't enough.

In 2002 he and Laurent Eschenauer published a scheme for random key predistribution in wireless sensor networks, where each node gets a random subset of a large key pool. It became one of the field's most cited papers. Gligor spent many years at the University of Maryland before moving to Carnegie Mellon in 2007.