Bob Fabry

Bob Fabry is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his contributions to operating systems, computer architecture, and security.

Fabry joined the Berkeley faculty in 1967 and remained there until his retirement. His research interests included capability-based addressing, security mechanisms in operating systems, and the design of high-performance computer systems. He played a significant role in the design and development of the Berkeley UNIX operating system, particularly in the area of virtual memory management.

His work on capabilities, a security model where access rights are represented as unforgeable tokens, has had a lasting impact on security research and system design. Capabilities offer a fine-grained approach to access control and are considered a powerful mechanism for building secure systems.

Fabry received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Redlands and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).