I’m a professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University. I joined the faculty here after many years at AT&T  Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. I do research on networks, security and why the two don’t get along.

In 2001, I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. I was awarded the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award.

I’m the co-author, with Bill Cheswick, of the book Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker. The second edition, with Aviel D. Rubin as an additional author, is now out.

I earned a B.A. from Columbia University; following that, I wandered south and managed an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

While a graduate student, I helped create USENET. For this, the statute of limitations having expired, I and two others perpetrators (Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis) were awarded the 1995 Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award, known, appropriately enough, as “The Flame“. The Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes and celebrates singular contributions to the Unix community in both intellectual achievement and service. USENET was an experiment started in 1979 to create an electronic bulletin board to facilitate the posting and reading of news messages and notices. Today it has more than 10,000 discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide variety of subjects, tens of thousands of USENET sites, and many millions of participants.