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Bill Cheswick is a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Lumeta Corp., a spinoff of Lucent/ Bell Labs and based on the Internet Mapping Project. Cheswick received a B.S. in Fundamental Science in 1975 at Lehigh University.
Accomplishments
Cheswick's illustrious career took off at Bell Labs, at which he started working in 1987. It was there that he and Steve Bellovin co-authored the book Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling The Wily Hacker, which is considered the authoritative volume on Internet Security of its time. This book brought him fame in the community, and deeply influenced network security well into the 90's.
His second significant accomplishment was the Internet Mapping Project. With Hal Burch as his assistant, he first mapped the internet in 1998, using tracerouting techniques. The Internet Mapping Project has been a significant contribution to study routing problems and changes, DDoS attacks, and graph theory. Network mapping is further used to understand the topography of intranets of companies, US government bodies, and other large entities, and is key to developing security systems for these networks.
Cheswick (known affectionately as simply "Ches") and Burch founded the spinoff Lumeta in 2000.
Current Projects
Cheswick frequents Internet Security conferences like USENIX Security, where he is well-known for giving talks with a special humor and flair. He often speaks on expert panels at these conferences and discusses current developments in internet security. His friends at these conferences include experts such as Avi Rubin, security specialist and Matt Blaze, cryptographer.
Cheswick has also recently developed the Packet Telescope. This is a script that logs packets sent to a black hole IP on a network so patterns can be observed. Packet telescopes are now used in large groups to monitor activity in large networks or the entire internet, and have been used on multiple occasions to be a first warning for a spreading worm or other large-scale attack.
Cheswick is also developing a revolutionized software system in the field of visualization, which observes a fourth "time" dimension in its models-- A new graphic user interface (GUI) is also being designed to effectively view the model. Details of this project cannot yet be released.
Hobbies, Interests, and Personal Projects
Cheswick currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and 2 children. His home is a smart house, equipped with a friendly voice that reports relevant information, from mailbox status to evening stock news.
Cheswick has developed a few interactive exhibits for science museums, including the Liberty Science Center in New York.
Cheswick also enjoys model rocketry, collecting cruft, lock picking (both electronic and physical), and creating social memes.
His is an international family, with his daughter Kestrel studying Arabic (and chemistry) at The University of Edinburgh in Scotland, U.K.
Cheswick and the Security Community
Cheswick is both famous and slightly controversial in the security community. He is obligated to give the occasional autograph to a fan, and tends to be mobbed by fellow security buffs at conferences. But his controversy comes from his stance on hacking and data interception. Some of Cheswick's methods for data collection have brought criticism from purist security experts, and this debate has grown among the community, creating two blocs of ideology: Cheswick's group trusts the White Hat Hacker to do good with the tools he employs. The second group believes privacy is more important than research that could be done via questionable access to information. These topics are said to be "ahead of the law"-- that is, they have not yet been addressed formally by congress or a court, so there is not yet a definitive answer for this particular debate.
External links
"William Cheswick"