Einar Stefferud

Einar Stefferud (Stef) (11 January 1930 – ) is an Internet pioneer, computer researcher and entrepreneur, who has made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly in the areas of IETF RFCs and standards, secure online payment systems, DNS, and secure email. Einar Stefferud is one of the original designers of the MIME protocol for sending multimedia Internet electronic mail.

Stef was born in Wausau, Wisconsin and earned a BA and MBA from UCLA. He is a Retired Adjunct Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.

Stef has been active in ARPA/NSF/IETF DARPA Internet research and development since 1975. He was involved in pre-standards work for X.400/X.500 in IFIP WG 6.5, and post-standards profiling in the NIST OIW. He was involved in the US ANSI OSI Registration Authority; the US National Mail Transfer Service Interest Group (USMTS) and the [IETF] (Internet Engineering Task Force) where he has been involved with email standards development (e.g., MIME, SMTP Extensions and MHTML). He was Chair of IFIP Working Group 6.5 on Upper Layer Protocols, Architectures and Applications (ULPAA) from 1990 to 1996. He served as Chair of the 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994 IFIP WG 6.5 ULPAA Conferences.

In 1999, at the end of the DNS domain name registry management discussions during the formation of ICANN, Stef was nominated Registry Advisory Board Member at Network Solutions (NSI), to provide independent external advisory review of the design and testing of the NSI Shared Registration SystemThe Shared Registration System created a registry-registrar model for the DNS TLDs .COM, .ORG, and .NET, which opened up the business of domain name registration.] .

Stef was founder (1969) and President of Network Management Associates, where he provided Strategic Technical and Management Advisory Information Services on internet environments until 2000. He was a co-founder (1994) of First Virtual Holdings, called "the first cyberbank" by the Smithsonian Institution, that launched an Internet Payment System in October 1994. First Virtual technology and patents are still in current use.

Stef was honored by Communications Week Magazine as one of the Top 10 Visionaries in the Computer-Communications Industry for 1993 (Communications Week, 23 August 1993), and has been awarded Patent No. 5,757,917 with Dr. Marshall T. Rose and Nathaniel Borenstein for a "Computerized Payment System for Purchasing Goods and Services on the Internet".

Breaking and creating new paradigms has been part of Stef's life. This experience is presented in his classic talk Stefferud, Einar, "What is the Internet Paradigm?", http://nma.com/papers/InternetParadigm.pdf] originally from 1994 and given in several events in the US and abroad.

As the Internet develops, the next new paradigm envisioned by Stef is trust. In the early days of the Internet every user was a trusted user, as authorized by DARPA, but this is no longer the case -- today, anyone can use the Internet, create webpages, send and receive email. The Internet paradigm of trust, as expected by Stef, found a close expression in the ideas of [http://gerck.com Dr. Ed Gerck] . In the context of Information Theory Ed Gerck defines and contrasts trust with social functions such as Ed Gerck, in "Trust Points", Digital Certificates: Applied Internet Security by J. Feghhi, J. Feghhi and P. Williams, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-20-130980-7, 1998.] [http://mcwg.org/mcg-mirror/trustdef.htm power, surveillance, and accountability] .

Stef is co-founder (2001) and currently chair of the Advisory Board of Network Manifold Associates Inc., [http://nma.com NMA] , that develops "target-free" technologies for secure Internet communications. Stef has been involved in the creation of ZSENTRY and Zmail, which are next-generation security technologies (when server- and client- security becomes less relevant).

Stef lives with his wife in Huntington Beach, California.

References

External links

* [http://mcwg.org MCWG -- Internet work group archives, with ideas on security and trust]
* [http://safevote.com Safevote, application of ZSENTRY technology to secure online voting]