Steven Bellovin
- See also Wikipedia's article about "Steven Bellovin".
- See also Steven Bellovin's entry in Columbia's directory.
Steven M. Bellovin, CC '72, is a professor in the Computer Science Department who specializes in computer security and networks. He worked at Bell Labs for over 20 years before joining the Columbia faculty in 2005. He sort of resembles Santa Claus, despite being Jewish. In Fall 2006, he was hit by a car and returned the next week on a cane and jokingly suggested, "Maybe my next paper should be an examination of how a person and a motor vehicle cannot occupy the same space at the same time."
Teaching
Bellovin started teaching in 2005, so he's pretty new and seems to be figuring stuff out. He's a pretty big name in computer security, so he's often out of town on talks and receiving awards and stuff (~90% attendance rate). You can really get all the information you need from his slides, which he posts online, but then you miss out on all the cool tangents he goes on in class about the early days of the internet.
Cool Publications
- Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker (2nd edition) - one of the first books on internet security, first edition is available in full online.
- "The Security Flag in the IPv4 Header" (RFC 3514) - an April fool's day prank memo where Bellovin requests that everyone who writes malicious internet packets include an "evil bit" which is enabled for any packets that have malicious intent, but is off otherwise. Bellovin claims that this would secure the internet by allowing firewalls to simply filter out these packets. A bunch of people took it seriously and e-mailed him telling he was an idiot (including an employee from Microsoft).
- "Using the Domain Name System for System Break-Ins" - a paper outlining a huge flaw in the DNS protocol which Bellovin wrote in 1990 but chose to withold because it could have been used to completely fuck up the Internet. He eventually published it in 1995 after finding it on a hacker's website, leaked from one of the few people Bellovin had shared the paper with.
