Schroeder was born in 1945 in
Richland,
Washington. He did his undergraduate work at Washington State University and went to graduate school at MIT, obtaining his PhD in 1972. Starting in 1976 he has been on the MIT EECS department faculty, at
Xerox PARC, and at the
DEC Systems Research Center. At MIT he was involved with
Multics, where his contributions included a seminal work on security architecture for shared information systems. In 1977 Schroeder and Roger Needham designed a new (unclassified) computer network protocol for distributed
authentication server using a Key Distribution Center (KDC). This idea eventually led to the
Kerberos authentication scheme used by MIT's
Project Athena. He has also built Grapevine (a distributed system), the filesystem of
Cedar, Topaz (a distributed OS), Autonet (a LAN), and Pachyderm (a web-based email system). He is the co-author of
The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. ==Awards==