Roger Michael Needham Commander of the Order of the British Empire FREng FRS (February 9, 1935–March 1, 2003) was a United Kingdom computer scientist.

Needham began his undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge in 1953, graduating with a B.A. in 1956 in mathematics and philosophy. His Doctor of Philosophy thesis was on applications of digital computer to the automatic classification and retrieval of documents. He worked on a variety of key computing projects in Computer Security, operating systems, computer architecture (capability systems) and local area network.

Among his theoretical contributions is the development of the Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic for authentication, generally known as the BAN logic. His Needham-Schroeder (coinvented with Michael Schroeder) security protocol forms the basis of the Kerberos (protocol) authentication and key exchange system. He also codesigned the Tiny Encryption Algorithm and XTEA encryption algorithm.

He joined Cambridge s Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, then called the Mathematical Laboratory, in 1962, became head of the lab in 1980, was made a professor in 1981 and remained with the lab until his retirement in 1995. Needham then set up Microsoft s UK-based Microsoft Research in 1997. He was also one of the founding Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1985, became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1993 and received a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to Computing in 2001. He also was a longtime and respected member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy. He was married to Karen Spärck Jones.

He died of cancer in March 2003 at his home in Willingham, Cambridgeshire. The British Computer Society, in 2004, established an annual Roger Needham Lecture in his honour.

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