Hall:Norman Hardy
Norman Hardy, Principal Architect, is a recognized authority on communication, security, and operating systems technologies.His work at Agorics has included participation in the design of GuardOS, the electronic check project, the WebMart project and GuardPoste.This work has led to seven patents in the areas of electronic commerce and security.Mr. Hardy was the architect for KeyKOS, a portable micro-kernel operating system providing the architecture for security, robust availability, efficient hosting of other operating systems, persistent virtual memory, and resource accounting.KeyKOS was recommended by the NCSC for a B3 security rating.Mr. Hardy was awarded a software security patent in 1985 for the security technology implemented in KeyKOS.Mr. Hardy was co-architect of Tymnet, the first and largest private, packet-switch network, now owned and operated by British Telecom.He has also worked with IBM and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
- The Path to Coyotos
- www.coyotos.org, 1 Dec 2004 [cached]
- Architected by Norm Hardy, Charlie Landau, and Bill Frantz, KeyKOS was a highly robust software-based capability system.
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Norm had been a member of the Advanced Computing Systems group at IBM (the group that brought us both the S/360 and the RISC concept).
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Frustrated with the KeyKOS licensing problem, Norm Hardy and I resolved to reverse engineer KeyKOS. I had never seen the KeyKOS code (I still haven't), and I spent several months ``deposing Norm on how KeyKOS was structured. That entire session of discussions was recorded on tape, and to the best of our knowledge everything that Norm disclosed had previously been disclosed by Key Logic in one form or another - it had just never been accumulated together in cohesive form.
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Over time, the EROS work became as much my own as Norm's (and I think Norm would agree with that). In 1993, I decided to go back to graduate school for a Ph.D.. EROS went with me and became the focus of my dissertation work.
EROS owes an incredible intellectual debt to Norm, Charlie, and Bill.
The primary designers of Joule are ...
- www.erights.org, 29 Mar 2011 [cached]
- The primary designers of Joule are E-Dean Tribble, Norm Hardy, and myself (with significant contributions by Pavel Curtis and Chip Morningstar).
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Norm Hardy was the chief architect of KeyKOS. Despite the difference in goals and starting points, the philosophy of computation arrived at by the two groups was amazingly similar. Indeed, Norm, Dean, and I saw eye to eye on almost everything. Many of the lessons we learned from Norm seemed to not only help us "think KeyKOS" better, but also to "think Actors" better than any lessons available from that tradition.
The one persistent source of disagreement was the question of EQ. Actors didn't have EQ, and Joule's ambitions of flexibility demanded that Joule not have it either. KeyKOS does have EQ (called DISCRIM), and is implicitly or explicitly the basis for several of its impressive security patterns, such as the Factory. Early on, Dean showed how the Factory could be done without EQ. Several years of argument ensued, were Norm would propose problems he thought required an EQ primitive, and Dean would then show how to solve the problem in Joule without any such primitive. I participated on both sides, with a preference for no EQ if it wasn't crucial.
Then, while writing the Escrow Exchange Agent as part of the WebMart system of capability-secure distributed electronic commerce (a collaboration between Agorics and Sun Labs), I ran into a problem that seemed to be insoluble without an EQ primitive. Fortunately for the project, the distributed capability system we had built (orginally known as Corbamite, later attached to Tcl and renamed Tclio), did provide for distributed EQ. However, the problem became another challenge in the controversy. Norm boiled the logic of the problem down to the Grant Matcher Puzzle.
- The Path to Coyotos
- www.coyotos.org, 1 Dec 2004 [cached]
- Architected by Norm Hardy, Charlie Landau, and Bill Frantz, KeyKOS was a highly robust software-based capability system.
...
Norm had been a member of the Advanced Computing Systems group at IBM (the group that brought us both the S/360 and the RISC concept).
...
Frustrated with the KeyKOS licensing problem, Norm Hardy and I resolved to reverse engineer KeyKOS.I had never seen the KeyKOS code (I still haven't), and I spent several months "deposing" Norm on how KeyKOS was structured.That entire session of discussions was recorded on tape, and to the best of our knowledge everything that Norm disclosed had previously been disclosed by Key Logic in one form or another â€" it had just never been accumulated together in cohesive form.
...
Over time, the EROS work became as much my own as Norm's (and I think Norm would agree with that).In 1993, I decided to go back to graduate school for a Ph.D..EROS went with me and became the focus of my dissertation work.
EROS owes an incredible intellectual debt to Norm, Charlie, and Bill.
Background - Employment History
- Board Member
- Metricom , Inc.
- Senior Architect
- Agorics , Inc.
- Principal Architect
- Agorics , Inc.
- Architect
- KeyKOS
- Member of the Advanced Computing Systems Group
- IBM Corporation
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Web References
- Metricom | Media Center: Press Release May 30, 2000
- www.metricom.com, 30 May 2000 [cached]
- Norman Hardy, Senior Architect, Agorics - security
- Meet Agorics' Staff
- www.agorics.com, 20 Sept 2008 [cached]
