Vern Paxson

Biography

Vern Paxson, PhD, is a Distinguished Fellow at ICSI and Co-founder and Chief Scientist at Corelight Inc., which employs the Zeek system he and his group have long developed to provide security teams with network evidence to protect large organizations and companies.

Dr. Paxson’s research focuses on internet measurement, intrusion detection, cybercrime, and censorship technology. While a graduate student and staff member of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he began developing the Zeek network monitoring system, which has been used operationally to detect and block network attacks since 1996. Dr. Paxson joined ICSI in 1999, led ICSI’s Networking and Security Group until 2022, and is also former Vice President of ICSI. He also served as a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at UC Berkeley from 2007-2021, and continues to serve on the UC Berkeley faculty as a Professor of the Graduate School.

Dr. Paxson earned a BS from Stanford University and an MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• IEEE Internet Award
• ACM SIGCOMM Award
• ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
• ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award
• Facebook Internet Defense Prize
• Sakrison Memorial Prize for outstanding dissertation research

Selected Leadership Activities

• Area director, Internet Engineering Task Force
• Chair, Internet Research Task Force
• Vice chair, ACM SIGCOMM
• Steering committee, ACM Internet Measurement Conference (co-founder), USENIX ENIGMA, USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet

Areas of Expertise

• Computer Networks, Internet Protocols, and Web Infrastructure
• Network Security, Reliability, and Resilient Architectures
• Cybersecurity for Systems, Networks, and Cloud Platforms
• Threat Intelligence, Malware Detection, and Cyber Defense

ICSI Activity