Vern Paxson

Biography

Vern Paxson leads the Networking and Security Group. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University and his master’s and doctorate from UC Berkeley, the latter in 1997. He has had a long affiliation with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), where he continues to hold a position as a staff scientist. While a graduate student and staff member of LBNL, he began developing the Bro Network Intrusion Detection System, which has been used by LBNL to detect and block network attacks since 1996. In 1999, he joined ICSI, and in 2007 he was appointed a professor of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of UC Berkeley. He has served as an area director of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the chair of the Internet Research Task Force, and the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM. He co-founded the Internet Measurement Workshop (now Conference), the Workshop on Rapid Malcode, and the Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats. He has received the IEEE Internet Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award, several best paper awards, and the Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding dissertation research.

Research Interest

Fundamental architectural questions, new forwarding mechanisms and novel management approaches to network defenses, cybercrime, troubleshooting, and measurement and characterization.