Corelight Co-founder Dr. Vern Paxson Receives Prominent USENIX Security Test of Time Award

Paxson’s 1998 paper “Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time” honored for its profound impact on the field of security and privacy

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Corelight, the leader in open network detection and response (NDR), today announced company co-founder, and creator of Zeek®, Dr. Vern Paxson has received the distinguished USENIX “Test of Time” award for his work entitled “Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time” published in 1998. The paper marked the official launch of open source technology Bro (now known as Zeek), which has since become the de-facto standard for network security monitoring and network visibility.

“Dr. Paxson’s work in creating Bro marked a turning point in how organizations could get a handle on, and gain better access to, the traffic that was coming into their networks at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy,” said Dr. Kevin Fu, associate professor of EECS at the University of Michigan and USENIX steering committee member. “The committee felt strongly that this paper should stand as a ‘must read’ classic paper for any graduate computer security course.”

The USENIX “Test of Time” award is intended to recognize papers that have had a lasting impact on their respective fields and that were presented at its respective conference at least 10 years ago.

“In the late 1990s, effective ways to monitor and analyze traffic over the Internet were virtually nonexistent. That left sites unable to distinguish malicious traffic from harmless traffic,” said Paxson. “Bro/Zeek was designed as a means of identifying possible intrusions on a network right as they were happening, by analyzing in detail the traffic flying by on high-speed network links. By open sourcing the code, the hope was that it would both benefit the community and in turn benefit from community efforts to enhance it.

“More than 20 years later it is a thrill to see how not only how expansive the Bro/ Zeek, community has grown, but also to see how the thousands of contributions to it over the years have made it one of the most powerful and reliable network security offerings today,” he continued. “I have long had roots in the USENIX…