Distinguished Practitioner Keynote: Scaling Properties of Software and System Security

Chair: Stephen Schwab, USC Information Sciences Institute

Scaling Properties of Software and System Security

Dr. Paul Vixie, CEO, Farsight Security

Abstract: Humanity has been building and programming general purpose computers for about six decades now, with spectacular results, mostly good. As we contemplate the Internet of Things in light of our collective experience, there are some disturbing conclusions to be drawn. Can we as a species safely place our economy and culture into a global distributed network of computers, if those computers are programmed by humans using commodity programming languages and tools? Dr. Paul Vixie is personally responsible for more CERT vulnerability notifications than any other living programmer, and he'll share his thoughts on the likely results of Software as Usual as applied to 21st century society.

About the Speaker

Dr. Paul Vixie is an Internet pioneer. Currently, he is the Chairman, CEO and cofounder of award-winning Farsight Security, Inc. Previously, he served as President, Chairman and Founder of Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), as President of MAPS, PAIX and MIBH, as CTO of Abovenet/MFN, and on the boards of several for-profit and non-profit companies.

In 2014, Dr. Vixie testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism United States Senate Committee for a hearing on “Taking  Down Botnets.”  The same year Dr. Vixie was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame for his work related to DNS.

In addition, Dr. Vixie served on the ARIN Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2013, as ARIN Chairman in 2008 and 2009, and was a founding member of ICANN Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) and ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). He operated the ISC's F-Root name server for many years, and is a member of Cogent's C-Root team. Dr. Vixie is a sysadmin for Op-Sec-Trust.

Dr. Vixie has been contributing to Internet protocols and UNIX systems as a protocol designer and software architect since 1980. He wrote Cron (for BSD and Linux), and is considered the primary author and technical architect of BIND 4.9 and BIND 8, and he hired many of the people who wrote BIND 9. He has authored or co-authored a dozen or so RFCs, mostly on DNS and related topics, and of Sendmail: Theory and Practice (Digital Press, 1994). His technical contributions include DNS Response Rate Limiting (RRL), DNS Response Policy Zones (RPZ), and Network Telemetry Capture (NCAP). He earned his Ph.D. from Keio University for work related to DNS and DNSSEC.

A frequent speaker at industry conferences around the world, Dr. Vixie has presented at events such as Copenhagen Cybercrime Conference, RSA, Black Hat, SANS, FIRST, and IGNITE.