Fred Cohen
More info
- Affiliation
- University of Southern California, Sandia
- Known for
- Computer viruses as a research field, Deception Toolkit
The grad student who wrote a self-spreading program on a VAX in 1983 and got his advisor to call it a virus.
In November 1983, at a USC seminar, Cohen showed how a program could copy itself into other programs and gain full access to a Unix machine in under an hour. It was Leonard Adleman — the A in RSA — who suggested the word virus. The paper Computer Viruses: Theory and Experiments followed in 1984, and the system owners promptly banned further experiments.
His 1986 dissertation proved what every antivirus vendor has lived with since: deciding whether an arbitrary program is a virus is undecidable, a close cousin of the halting problem. Detection can only ever be heuristic. In 1998 he released the Deception Toolkit, an early honeypot.