Roger Schell

MIT Multics graduate student in the late 1960s/early 1970s who, per Tom Van Vleck's first-person history, "turned out" to be a serving US Air Force major sent to MIT for an advanced degree. He went on to co-author, with Paul Karger, the 1974 Air Force-sponsored Multics Security Evaluation: Vulnerability Analysis (ESD-TR-74-193) — the report that first documented the compiler trap-door mechanism Ken Thompson popularized a decade later in "Reflections on Trusting Trust."

Matters to this vault as the more foundational of the report's two authors: his connection to Multics predates Karger's co-authorship by way of his own MIT graduate work, which is separate standing beyond the one joint paper (per the vault's co-authorship-is-a-mention ruling). See claim-thompson-1984-credits-karger-schell-1974-matthew-effect for the citation-correction history, and claim-shared-multics-environment-predates-karger-schell-1974-report-not-credit-channel for why his earlier MIT period does not itself explain how the 1974 report reached Thompson. Paul Karger remains a mention only, per the 2026-10-01 co-authorship ruling.

References

• claim-thompson-1984-credits-karger-schell-1974-matthew-effect
• claim-shared-multics-environment-predates-karger-schell-1974-report-not-credit-channel
• Captures: 2026-10-29-ken-thompsons-1984-reflections-on-trusting-trust-credits