For this contribution, Professor Lam and three graduate students in his research project won the 2004 ACM Software System Award.

His doctoral dissertation on packet switching in a multi-access broadcast channel was supervised by Professor Leonard Kleinrock.

From 1971 to 1974, he was a Postgraduate Research Engineer and later a Postdoctoral Scholar at the ARPA Network Measurement Center, UCLA, where he worked on the packet satellite project of ARPANET.

Ten years later, in 1993, Professor Lam co-founded the International Conference on Network Protocols [11] sponsored by IEEE Computer Society.

In 2007, Simon Lam was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering,[14] widely considered among the highest honors to be earned in the engineering and technology professions, for "contributions to computer network protocols and network security services.”[15]Simon Lam conceived a new security sublayer in the Internet protocol stack in 1990.

They presented the case for secure sockets and SNP performance results at the USENIX Summer Technical Conference on June 8, 1994.

The SNP approach was novel and created a paradigm shift away from contemporary research on security for distributed applications (e.g., MIT’s Kerberos, 1988-1992).

[16][17] Subsequent secure sockets layers (SSL and TLS), re-implemented years later using the architecture and key ideas in SNP, are widely used for securing transactions between Web browsers and servers for e-commerce, as well as other Internet applications including email, instant messaging, and VoIP.