Herbert Bos

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has an S.B. degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was formerly Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems. He also won a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant. In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, local-area distributed systems and distributed systems. This research has led to over 200 refereed publications in journals and conferences. Prof. Tanenbaum has also authored or co-authored 5 books, which have been translated into over 20 languages, ranging from Basque to Thai. They are used at universities all over the world. There are 163 versions of his books.

 

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software, notably MINIX, a small UNIX clone. It was the direct inspiration for Linux and the platform on which Linux was initially developed. The current version of MINIX, called MINIX 3, is now focused on being an extremely reliable and secure operating system.

 

Herbert Bos obtained his Master's degree from Twente University and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. Since then, he has worked extensively on dependable and efficient I/O architectures for operating systems like Linux, but also research systems based on MINIX 3. He is currently a professor at the VUSec Systems Security and Research Group in the department of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

 

With his group, he discovered and analysed many vulnerabilities in both hardware and software. From buggy memory chips to vulnerable CPUs, and from flaws in operating systems to novel exploitation techniques, the research has led to fixes in most major operating systems, most popular browsers, and all modern Intel processors.