Peter G. Neumann, computer security pioneer and privacy advocate, dies at 93

Peter G. Neumann spent decades arguing that computers were being built with too little regard for safety, security and privacy, and the daily realities of ransomware, data harvesting and fragile digital infrastructure have given his warnings a grim afterlife. He died on Sunday, May 17, 2026, at age 93.

Neumann’s reach ran through the institutions that shaped modern computing. He had been at SRI International since September 1971, where his work focused on computer system survivability, security, reliability, human safety, high assurance, election-system integrity and privacy. Before that, he spent about 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, working on Multics with MIT and Honeywell, and he later became one of the central voices in the Association for Computing Machinery’s public-policy and software-engineering debates.

He also helped build the field’s warning system. Neumann founded ACM SIGSOFT and moderated the ACM Forum on Risks to the Public in the Use of Computers and Related Systems, better known as the RISKS Forum, a long-running venue for discussion of human safety, privacy, ethics and legal responsibility in computing. His work extended to the PSOS effort, an early attempt to create a provably secure operating system, and to later research on intrusion detection and trustworthy systems.

Neumann’s skepticism about easy answers was formed early. He earned three Harvard degrees, an A.B. in mathematics in 1954, an S.M. in 1955 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1961. He held a Fulbright scholarship in Germany from 1958 to 1960. In a 2013 oral-history interview, he said a two-hour breakfast conversation with Albert Einstein as an undergraduate deeply shaped the way he thought about complexity.

He remained active into the final months of his life. In January 2026, he coauthored a Communications of the ACM piece considering what healthcare systems might learn from earlier efforts to build highly trustworthy computer systems. The same broad concerns that animated his career, from crypto policy and voting-system integrity to software safety, still defined his commentary as cyberattacks multiplied and personal data became a commodity.

Recognition followed his influence. ACM gave him its Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award in 1992 and named him an ACM Fellow in 1994. He received the National Computer System Security Award in 2002 and the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award in 2005. In 2012, he was profiled for a clean-slate effort to redesign computers and software from scratch to make them more secure, a premise that, in hindsight, captured the central truth of his career: the industry kept patching symptoms while Neumann kept warning about the design itself.