Rick Boivie

Dr. Rick Boivie, a member of the IBM Academy of Technology at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, has a long history of innovation in the areas of computer architecture, operating systems, networking and security -- as an individual researcher, first-line manager, second-line manager and technical executive.

He had leadership roles going back to IBM's first Unix systems and first TCP/IP systems (and wrote IBM's first ethernet driver).

He was technical lead and then manager of the group in Milford, Connecticut that developed the hardware and software for the 'New NSFNET'. The 'New NSFNET' was the principal backbone of the Internet from 1988 to 1995 and increased the capacity of the links in the Internet backbone from 56 Kbits/second to 1.5 Mbits/second and then to 45 Mbits/second.  This was the spark that ignited the worldwide Internet revolution of the 1990's.  (In late 1987 or early 1988, he and a colleague also built what may have been the world's first Internet firewall.)

More recently, he led a project to develop a highly secure CPU chip (SecureBlue) that has been used in 10's of millions of systems to protect these systems from physical attack and physical tampering.

Even more recently, he invented and developed an initial prototype of SecureBlue++, an innovative CPU architecture that builds upon SecureBlue and provides 'fine-grained' SecureBlue-like protection to protect the confidentiality and integrity of an application's information from the other software on a system including privileged software, like the operating system, device drivers and applications that run with root privileges -- and malware that obtains root privileges by exploiting a bug in privileged software. (This was the start of a trend across industry and academia to develop and experiment with 'Secure Execution' (also known as 'Confidential Computing')).

He has been named an IBM Master Inventor and an IBM Distinguished Engineer and has received a number of 'Outstanding Innovation', 'Outstanding Technical Achievement' and Corporate awards.