In November 1952, a Harvard sophomore, Peter G. Neumann, had a two-hour breakfast with Albert Einstein in which they discussed the physicist’s philosophy that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
For Dr. Neumann, who would become one of the nation’s leading computer security researchers, Einstein’s aphorism led to a lifelong romance with the beauty and perils of complexity.
Dr. Neumann died on Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif. His death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of a recent fall, his daughter, Helen Neumann, said.
He was 93 and was still working full time on a Pentagon-supported advanced computer security design that is being adopted by companies like Google and Microsoft.
Since 1971, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) had worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., and he had long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry prone to repeatedly making the same mistakes.
In 2010, he began a research project that investigated how to guard against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions cannot be executed.
An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each open only the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy or modify those keys.
Recently, an industry organization known as CHERI Alliance has begun to commercialize the design for consumer products and industrial applications.
“Peter Neumann is both one of the last of the old guard and a pointer to the future,” Whitfield Diffie, a mathematician and cryptographer who is an inventor of public key cryptography, said. “He describes himself as having had a 70-year career in computer science, starting with his graduation from Harvard, and he has always advocated starting with hardware designed to support security.”
Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as the editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands.
He maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for a book, “Computer-Related Risks.”
In the 1990s, Dr. Neumann was a key researcher on a DARPA-funded research project to develop new ways of detecting intruders in large computer networks. Known as Emerald, the project did not lead to a successful commercial spinoff, but SRI won several lawsuits against Silicon Valley companies for using the technology without a license.
Despite his influence in the computer security world, Dr. Neumann maintained a low profile.
“There’s no limit on the impact that a small team can have if they don’t care who gets credit,” said Patrick Lincoln, the office director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, who described Dr. Neumann as routinely working behind the scenes without credit. “The world is just so much a better place for having had Peter.”
Dr. Neumann was a frequent critic of the lax attitudes of the industry toward computer security and individual digital privacy.
“I’m fundamentally an optimist with regard to what we can do with research,” he said. “I’m fundamentally a pessimist with respect to what corporations who are fundamentally beholden to their stockholders do, because they’re always working on short-term appearance.”
Peter Gabriel Neumann was born on Sept. 21, 1932, in Manhattan. His father, Israel Ber Neumann, was a noted art dealer in Germany who opened the New Art Circle gallery in New York after moving to the United States in 1923. His mother, Elsa Schmid Neumann, was a mosaic artist who was commissioned to create a colorful portrait of Einstein, displayed for many years in the main library at Boston University. They struck up a friendship, and she was able to arrange the two-hour breakfast with her son.
Peter grew up in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan before his family moved to Rye, N.Y., where he attended high school.
He enrolled at Harvard in 1950 and took his first computing job, which involved programming an IBM card-punched calculator for the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, one summer during college. By his senior year, he had become one of the first computer hackers. (The term originally referred to those who were fascinated by computers, rather than those who broke into computer networks.)
At Harvard, he was also one of the first programmers to have solo access to his own “personal” computer — at least, on the weekend. The computer, known as the Mark IV, was among the world’s first stored-program computers. After earning the trust of its designer, Howard Aiken, in 1954, Peter would take over the care of the machine every Friday at 5 p.m.
With another student, Fredrick P. Brooks Jr., who would become an IBM computer designer, he wrote a paper on using the Mark IV to compose music.
After spending two years in Germany on a Fulbright fellowship, he received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard and joined Bell Laboratories in 1960. He spent a decade there and became a key developer of the Multics operating system, an early Pentagon-financed project that was the first systematic attempt to grapple with how to share computer resources securely among many users.
Multics, or Multiplexed Information and Computing Service, was developed collaboratively with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Laboratories and the Honeywell Corporation beginning in the mid-1960s. The project pioneered concepts that became foundational to modern computing.
Dr. Neumann retained a lifelong passion for music, playing a variety of instruments, including the bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, in a number of musical groups. At computer conferences, he frequently led his colleagues in Gilbert and Sullivan songs.
In December 2024, he made an anonymous $4 million donation to the San Francisco Symphony to save its chorus, his daughter, Helen, said.
She is his only survivor. Dr. Neumann’s first marriage, to Anne Ferris Rittershofer, ended in divorce. His second wife, Elizabeth Susan Neumann, died in 2020. Two sons, John and Christopher, also predeceased him.
Dr. Neumann occupied the same office at SRI International since he began working there as a computer researcher in 1971. Until the building was modified to make it earthquake-resistant, his office was notorious for the towering stacks of computer science literature stacked on every surface.
Legend has it that colleagues who visited after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake in 1989 were stunned to discover that while neighboring offices were in disarray, nothing in Dr. Neumann’s office appeared to have been disturbed.
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