Bill Cheswick
More info
- Affiliation
- AT&T Bell Labs, Lumeta
- Known for
- Firewalls and Internet Security, Berferd, Internet Mapping Project
The Bell Labs researcher who co-wrote the first serious book on firewalls and kept an intruder busy for months just to watch what he did.
In January 1991 Cheswick noticed someone probing Bell Labs' internet gateway. Rather than slam the door, he built a fake, jailed environment and let the intruder — nicknamed Berferd — carry on while every keystroke was logged. The resulting paper, An Evening with Berferd (1992), is one of the earliest descriptions of a honeypot.
1994 brought Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, co-written with Steve Bellovin, the book that made the firewall standard kit. The subtitle tips its hat to Clifford Stoll's chase. In 1998 he and Hal Burch started the Internet Mapping Project, charting the internet's topology with traceroute-style probes; the pictures became posters and the project became the company Lumeta.