William R. "Bill" Cheswick is a computer security and networking researcher
Education
Cheswick was graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1970 and received a Bachelor of Surgery in Fundamental Science in 1975 from Lehigh University. While at Lehigh, working with Doug Price and Steve Lidie, Cheswick co-authored the Senator line-oriented text editors
Career
Cheswick"s early career included contracting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania between 1975 and 1977. He was a Programmer for American Newspaper Publishers Association / Research Institute in Easton, Pennsylvania between 1976 and 1977 and a Systems Programmer for Computer Sciences Corporation in Warminster, Pennsylvania between 1977 and 1978. Following this, Cheswick joined Systems and Computer Technology Corporation where he served as a Systems Programmer and Consultant between 1978 and 1987.
Much of Cheswick"s early career was related to his expertise with Control Data Corporation (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) mainframes, their operating systems such as Supervisory Control Of Program Execution and NOS, and the related COMPASS assembly language.
Cheswick initially worked with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention systems as a student at Lehigh University. Cheswick joined Bell Labs in 1987.
Shortly thereafter, he and Steven M. Bellovin created one of the world"s first network firewalls. The resulting research and papers lead to their publication of the seminal book Firewalls and Internet Security, one of the first to describe the architecture of a firewall in detail.
Cheswick and Bellovin also created one of the world"s first honeypots in the course of detecting and trapping an attempted intruder into their network.
In 1998, Cheswick, still at Bell Labs (by then controlled by Lucent) started the Internet Mapping Project, assisted by Hal Burch. The research allowed large scale mapping of the internet for the first time, using tracerouting techniques to learn the connectivity graph of global networks. He joined American Telephone & Telegraph Company Shannon Laboratory in 2007, where he remained until 2012.
He has two children.
His home is a smart house, equipped with a voice synthesizer that reports relevant information, from mailbox status to evening stock news. Cheswick has developed a few interactive exhibits for science museums, including the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. Cheswick also enjoys model rocketry, and lock picking (both electronic and physical).