Vern Edward Paxson is a professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. He also leads the Networking and Security Group at the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

. His interests range from transport protocols to intrusion detection and worms. He is an active member of the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

(IETF) community and served as the chair of the IRTF from 2001 until 2005. From 1998 to 1999 he served on the IESG as Transport Area Director for the IETF. In 2006 Paxson was inducted as a

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned or professional societies, the term refers ...

(ACM). The ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) gave Paxson its 2011 award, "for his seminal contributions to the fields of Internet measurement and Internet security, and for distinguished leadership and service to the Internet community." The annual

SIGCOMM Award The annual SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks. The award is presented in the annual SIGCOMM Technical Conference. SIGCOMM is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ...

recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks. Paxson is also the original author of the

flex Flex or FLEX may refer to: Computing * Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, technologies for developing rich internet applications * Flex (language), developed by Alan Kay * FLEX (operating system), a single-tasking operating system for the Motorol ...

lexical analyzer and the

Zeek Zeek is a free and open-source software network analysis framework. Vern Paxson began development work on Zeek in 1995 at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Zeek is a network security monitor (NSM) but can also be used as a network intrusion detecti ...

intrusion detection system.

Backscatter In physics, backscatter (or backscattering) is the reflection of waves, particles, or signals back to the direction from which they came. It is usually a diffuse reflection due to scattering, as opposed to specular reflection as from a mirror, ...

is a term coined by Vern Paxson to describe

Internet background noise Internet background noise (IBN, also known as Internet background radiation, by analogy with natural background radiation) consists of data packets on the Internet addressed to IP addresses or ports where there is no network device set up to rec ...

resulting from a

DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

attack using multiple spoofed addresses. Paxson earned a PhD in 1997 at Berkeley under Domenico Ferrari.

References

External links

Vern Paxson's homepage
American computer programmers 2006 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people American computer security academics UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{compu-bio-stub