# Professor Emeritus, MIT

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/jerome-saltzer/
Last updated: 2026-09-20
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

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## Bio

Jerome Saltzer, professor emeritus at MIT, co-authored the 1975 paper "The Protection of Information in Computer Systems" with Michael Schroeder. Its list of design principles, least privilege, fail-safe defaults, complete mediation, economy of mechanism, separation of privilege, least common mechanism, open design, and psychological acceptability, is still the checklist the field measures itself against. He also worked on Multics and MIT's Project Athena, which produced Kerberos.

Profile built from public academic and publication records.

## Where their work shows up

Least privilege is the reason [privileged access management](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-pam/) and [access reviews](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-iga/) exist as practices rather than opinions. Psychological acceptability is the principle the industry ignored for thirty years of password complexity rules, and the one that [passkeys](https://startwithidentity.com/standards/webauthn-fido2/) finally satisfy: the secure path has to be the easy one, or users will route around it. Fifty years on, most identity failures still map to one of these eight principles.