Secure Network Programming
prototype of Secure Sockets Layer
Secure Network Programming (SNP) is a prototype of the first Secure Sockets Layer, designed and built in 1993 by the Networking Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, led by Simon S. Lam.
History
This work was published in the 1994 USENIX Summer Technical Conference. For this project, the authors won the 2004 ACM Software System Award.
Simon S. Lam was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame (2023) for "inventing secure sockets in 1991 and implementing the first secure sockets layer, named SNP, in 1993."
This work began in 1991 as a theoretical investigation by Lam and Shankar on the formal meaning of a protocol layer satisfying an upper interface specification as a service provider and a lower interface specification as a service consumer. A case study of adding a security layer between the application layer and network layer was presented.
Simon Lam wrote a proposal to the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1991 to investigate how to apply the theory of interfaces and modules to security verification. The proposal was funded from 6/28/1991 to 6/27/1993. At that time, there were three well-known authentication systems built (MIT's Kerberos) or being developed (DEC's SPX and IBM's KryptoKnight). All of these systems suffered from a common drawback; namely, they did not export a clean and easy-to-use interface that could be readily used by Internet applications. For example, it would take a tremendous amount of effort to "kerberize" an existing distributed application.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Secure Network Programming” is prototype of Secure Sockets Layer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Secure, Network and Programming, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85800207. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1994, 2004 and 2023.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Secure Network Programming” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.