Vern Paxson

Vern Edward Paxson is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and leads the Networking and Security Group at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. His research spans transport protocols, intrusion detection and internet worms; he is the original author of the flex lexical analyzer and the Zeek, originally Bro, network intrusion detection system, and he coined the term backscatter to describe internet background noise from denial-of-service attacks using spoofed addresses. He earned his PhD from Berkeley in 1997 under Domenico Ferrari, served as chair of the Internet Research Task Force from 2001 to 2005, and received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2007 and the SIGCOMM Award in 2011.