Keynote Address

Though the Internet background radiation is fairly intense these days, you could get a good packet sunburn twenty years ago if you were in the right place. These non-useful packets were port scans, network probes, and the death screams of machines succumbing to attacks on their address-based authentication.

Now, unwanted network traffic is a lot more sophisticated, but I think it's fair to say that most of it was foreseeable. What isn't clear is how one can get rid of it.

Bill Cheswick logged into his first computer in 1968. Seven years later, he was graduated from Lehigh University with a degree resembling Computer Science. Cheswick has worked on (and against) operating system security for over 35 years. Ches joined Bell Labs in 1987, where he became postmaster and firewall administrator. In 1990 he published a paper on firewall design that coined the word "proxy" in its current meaning. He followed this with "An Evening With Berferd," and then the publication of Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, co-authored with Steve Bellovin. In 1998, Ches starting the Internet Mapping Project with Hal Burch. This work became to core technology of a Bell Labs spin-off, Lumeta Corporation. He joined AT&T Research in April 2007.