Vern Paxson

Who is Vern Paxson?

Vern Edward Paxson is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He also works as an Internet researcher based at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. His interests range from transport protocols to intrusion detection and worms. He is an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force 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 of the IETF.

In 2006 Paxson was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. The ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications 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 recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks.

Paxson is also the original author of the flex lexical analyzer and the Bro intrusion detection system. Backscatter is a term coined by Vern Paxson to describe Internet background noise resulting from a DDoS attack using multiple spoofed addresses.