Yves Deswarte, Directeur de Recherche at LAAS-CNRS, passed away on Monday 27th January 2014.
His friends and colleagues at LAAS and all his fellow travellers through life are grief-stricken.
The Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance research group at LAAS-CNRS (TSF) has lost one of its most prominent researchers on dependable and secure computing. Yves has been a pioneer in computer security at LAAS-CNRS, and a renowned researcher both in France and worldwide.
Yves obtained his engineer degree from the Institut Supérieur d’Electronique du Nord (I.S.E.N.), Lille, in 1972, and ENSAE (SupAero), Toulouse, in 1973. He started his professional career as an R&D engineer at CIMSA in 1973. Then he joined INRIA in 1979 where he co-leaded the SURF pilot project in collaboration with the TSF group. He became a permanent researcher of this team in 1984. He was seconded to CNRS in 1998, before joining as permanent staff in 2000. Yves also spent a sabbatical period at Microsoft Cambridge (UK) in 1999 and was "Prime Investigator" of the DARPA DIT project, with SRI International, during the period 2000-2003.
Yves was a passionate and visionary researcher who made several major research contributions during his career. As an engineer, he contributed to the emergence during the 70's of two essential technologies: micro-computing and packet switched networks. In the 80's, he developed innovative distributed architectures that were tolerant to both accidental and malicious threats. During his career at INRIA and CNRS, he was a major actor in computer security in France and at the international level. He co-advised several generations of doctorate students and engineers. He obtained significant research results in this area, e.g., in intrusion tolerance and security assessment, or more recently on privacy protection. He was in particular a prominent advocate of the concept of a "white" ID card, allowing users to be authenticated while disclosing only a minimum amount of personal information. He obtained the Kristian Beckman Award from IFIP TC-11 and Outstanding Service Awards from IFIP and ESORICS. He also held several responsibilities within IFIP TC-11 and the ESORICS Conference. He was an emeritus member of the SEE.
Unanimously appreciated by his colleagues, Yves was a likeable person, passionate about his work and particularly invested for the success of the students and researchers that he advised during his career.
Tribute to/Hommage à Yves Deswarte (1949-2014) (in French)
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