Paul Vixie

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Paul Vixie
Paul Vixie - 2014.jpg
Paul Vixie in 2014
Born (1963-05-23) May 23, 1963 (age 61)
Nationality American
Alma mater Keio University
Occupation(s)Vice President, Security at Amazon Web Services (AWS) [1]
Known for ISC, BIND, MAPS, Vixie cron

Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System (DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open source software principles and methodology. [2] He also created and launched the first successful commercial anti-spam service. [3] He authored the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. At one point he ran his own consulting business, Vixie Enterprises. In 2002, Vixie held the record for "most CERT advisories due to a single author". [4] [5]

Contents

Early life

Paul A Vixie was born on 23 May 1963 and grew up in San Francisco, and his mother's maiden name is Killian. [6]

"There were no computers at my school. I used to cut school and go to City College of San Francisco, where they had a Honeywell system" — Paul Vixie [7]

In 1980, when George Washington High School in San Francisco told him he'd have to repeat 11th grade, he quit school and got a job as a programmer at a consulting firm. [7] [8] [9]

Career

Vixie worked on BIND [10] as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1988 to 1993. [1] After he left DEC in 1994, [11] he founded Internet Software Consortium (ISC) in 1996 [1] together with Rick Adams and Carl Malamud to support BIND and other software for the Internet. The activities of ISC were assumed by a new company, Internet Systems Consortium in 2004. Although ISC operates the F root name server, Vixie at one point joined the Open Root Server Network (ORSN) project and operated their L root server.

In 1995 he cofounded the Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX) and, after Metromedia Fiber Network (MFN) bought it in 1999, served as the chief technology officer to MFN / AboveNet and later as the president of PAIX. [12]

In 1998 he cofounded Mail Abuse Prevention System (MAPS), a California non-profit company with the goal of stopping email abuse.

Vixie is the author of several Request for Comments (RFC)s, including a Best Current Practice document on "Classless IN-ADDR.ARPA Delegation" (BCP 20), [12] and some Unix software. He stated in 2002 that he "now hold[s] the record for 'most CERT advisories due to a single author.'" [13] [4]

In 2008, Vixie served as a judge for the Mozilla Foundation's "Download Day", an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for most downloads in a single day for a new piece of software. [14]

Vixie served on the board of trustees of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) from 2005 to 2013, and served as chairman in 2009 and 2010. [15] Vixie also serves on the Security and Stability Advisory Committee of ICANN. [16]

He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Keio University in 2011. [17] [18]

In 2013, after nearly 20 years at ISC, he founded a new company, Farsight Security, Inc. spinning off the Security Business Unit from ISC. [19]

In 2014, Vixie was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as an Innovator. [20]

In 2021, Vixie's company FarSight Security was acquired by DomainTools. [21] Since 2022, he has been working at AWS. [22]

Realizations

Works

Patents

Related Research Articles

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the associated entities. Most prominently, it translates readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols. The Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985.

BIND is a suite of software for interacting with the Domain Name System (DNS). Its most prominent component, named, performs both of the main DNS server roles, acting as an authoritative name server for DNS zones and as a recursive resolver in the network. As of 2015, it is the most widely used domain name server software, and is the de facto standard on Unix-like operating systems. Also contained in the suite are various administration tools such as nsupdate and dig, and a DNS resolver interface library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sendmail</span> Open-source mail transfer agent

Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet.

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is a method of automatically updating a name server in the Domain Name System (DNS), often in real time, with the active DDNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information.

The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) are a suite of extension specifications by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for securing data exchanged in the Domain Name System (DNS) in Internet Protocol (IP) networks. The protocol provides cryptographic authentication of data, authenticated denial of existence, and data integrity, but not availability or confidentiality.

Site Finder was a wildcard DNS record for all .com and .net unregistered domain names, run by .com and .net top-level domain operator VeriSign between 15 September 2003 and 4 October 2003.

CISSP is an independent information security certification granted by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, also known as ISC2.

nslookup Utility to query the Domain Name System

nslookup is a network administration command-line tool for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) to obtain the mapping between domain name and IP address, or other DNS records.

The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) Protocol is a method used by clients to locate the URL of a configuration file using DHCP and/or DNS discovery methods. Once detection and download of the configuration file is complete, it can be executed to determine the proxy for a specified URL.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Systems Consortium</span>

Internet Systems Consortium, Inc., also known as ISC, is an American non-profit corporation that supports the infrastructure of the universal, self-organizing Internet by developing and maintaining core production-quality software, protocols, and operations. ISC has developed several key Internet technologies that enable the global Internet, including: BIND, ISC DHCP and Kea. Other software projects no longer in active development include OpenReg and ISC AFTR.

Michał Zalewski, also known by the user name lcamtuf, is a computer security expert and "white hat" hacker from Poland. He is a former Google Inc. employee, and currently the VP of Security Engineering at Snap Inc.

DNS spoofing, also referred to as DNS cache poisoning, is a form of computer security hacking in which corrupt Domain Name System data is introduced into the DNS resolver's cache, causing the name server to return an incorrect result record, e.g. an IP address. This results in traffic being diverted to any computer that the attacker chooses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open Root Server Network</span>

Open Root Server Network (ORSN) was a network of Domain Name System root nameservers for the Internet. ORSN DNS root zone information was kept in synchronization with the "official" Domain Name System root nameservers coordinated by ICANN. The networks were 100% compatible, though ORSN was operated independently. The ORSN servers were primarily placed in Europe. ORSN is also used by public name servers, providing Domain Name System access freely for everyone, without any limitation until the project closed in May 2019. ORSN was primarily started to reduce the over-dependence of Internet users on the United States and Department of Commerce/IANA/ICANN/VeriSign, limit the control over the Internet that this gives, while ensuring that domain names remain unambiguous. It also helps avoid the technical possibility of global "Internet shutdown" by one party. They also expect their network to make domain name resolutions faster for everyone.

This article presents a comparison of the features, platform support, and packaging of many independent implementations of Domain Name System (DNS) name server software.

The ISC license is a permissive free software license published by the Internet Software Consortium, now called Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It is functionally equivalent to the simplified BSD and MIT licenses, but without language deemed unnecessary following the Berne Convention.

DNS management software is computer software that controls Domain Name System (DNS) server clusters. DNS data is typically deployed on multiple physical servers. The main purposes of DNS management software are:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Kaminsky</span> American computer security researcher (1979–2021)

Daniel Kaminsky was an American computer security researcher. He was a co-founder and chief scientist of Human Security, a computer security company. He previously worked for Cisco, Avaya, and IOActive, where he was the director of penetration testing. The New York Times labeled Kaminsky an "Internet security savior" and "a digital Paul Revere".

host is a simple utility for performing Domain Name System lookups.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Response policy zone</span> Internet firewall mechanism for DNS

A response policy zone (RPZ) is a mechanism to introduce a customized policy in Domain Name System servers, so that recursive resolvers return possibly modified results. By modifying a result, access to the corresponding host can be blocked.

The following comparison of DHCP and DHCPv6 server compares general and technical information for several DHCP server software programs.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Paul Vixie's LinkedIn page".
  2. ↑ Filkins, Dexter (8 October 2018). "Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign? A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers". NewYorker.com. Archived from the original on 7 October 2021. Retrieved 12 October 2018.
  3. ↑ Reid, Brian ISC founder Paul Vixie inducted into the 2014 Internet Hall of Fame Archived 2021-04-30 at the Wayback Machine , ISC, April 9, 2014 (accessed March 25 2017)
  4. 1 2 Graff, Mark G.; Kenneth R. van Wyk (2003). Secure Coding: Principles and Practices . O'Reilly. pp. "Advance Praise" section. ISBN   978-0-596-00242-8. If this book had existed when I was learning C in the early 1980s, then I might not now hold the record for 'most CERT advisories due to a single author.' Anyone who wants a coding job at ISC in the future should be prepared to demonstrate that they have read and understand Secure Coding.
  5. ↑ "Paul Vixie : Security vulnerabilities, CVEs". www.cvedetails.com. Archived from the original on 2024-01-10. Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  6. ↑ "Paul A Vixie, Born 05/23/1963 in California | CaliforniaBirthIndex.org". www.californiabirthindex.org. Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  7. 1 2 "FREEWARE PIONEERS / Vixie's Bind Made Names for Web". SFGATE. Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  8. ↑ "40 years on, the Internet transmits every aspect of our lives". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  9. ↑ "The Future of the Internet and Privacy". www.bankinfosecurity.com. Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-10.
  10. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  11. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  12. 1 2 Executive Profile: Paul Vixie Archived 2018-06-13 at the Wayback Machine , Bloomberg (accessed 25 March 2017).
  13. ↑ Vixie, Paul (2002-02-26). "Re: Malformed SNMP Packet log/trace". North American Network Operations Group mailing list. Archived from the original on 2003-03-20. Retrieved 2007-03-07. note that i hold the single-author record for total CERT advisories, proving that in my copious youth I knew how to sling code but not how to manage risk.
  14. ↑ "Paul Vixie listed as a judge on the Firefox 3 2008 Download Day". Archived from the original on 2008-05-30. Retrieved 2008-05-30.
  15. ↑ "Former Members of the Board of Trustees". Archived from the original on 2021-04-17. Retrieved 2014-01-13.
  16. ↑ "SSAC Membership". Archived from the original on 2012-01-22. Retrieved 2011-08-25.
  17. ↑ "Google+ Profile". Archived from the original on 2016-03-11. Retrieved 2011-08-25.
  18. ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2024-01-01. Retrieved 2024-01-01.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  19. ↑ "ISC Spins Off Its Security Business Unit". Internet Systems Consortium. 2 July 2013. Archived from the original on 2013-07-09. Retrieved 2013-07-11.
  20. ↑ "Internet Hall of Fame Announces 2014 Inductees". ISOC. 8 April 2014. Archived from the original on 2014-04-08. Retrieved 2014-04-08.
  21. ↑ DNSFilter (2021-11-18). DNS Encryption Webinar: Paul Vixie (Farsight Security) and Peter Lowe (DNSFilter) on DNS-over-HTTPS . Retrieved 2024-08-07– via YouTube.
  22. ↑ "Defining the Role of Distinguished Engineers | AWS Executive Insights". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2024-08-07.
  23. ↑ "ISC DHCP". Internet Software Consortium. Archived from the original on 2014-01-17. Retrieved 2017-01-05.
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