William Cheswick

Early Life and Education

William R. Cheswick, commonly known as "Bill" or "Ches," graduated from Lawrenceville School in 1970 and went on to earn a B.S. in Fundamental Science from Lehigh University in 1975. During his time at Lehigh, he co-authored the Senator line-oriented text editor alongside Doug Price and Steve Lidie, and gained early hands-on experience with Control Data Corporation (CDC) mainframe systems, their operating systems SCOPE and NOS, and the COMPASS assembly language.

Early Career

Following graduation, Cheswick worked as a contractor in Bethlehem, PA between 1975 and 1977. He then served as a Programmer for the American Newspaper Publishers Association / Research Institute in Easton, PA from 1976 to 1977, and as a Systems Programmer for Computer Sciences Corporation in Warminster, PA from 1977 to 1978. He subsequently joined Systems and Computer Technology Corporation, where he worked as a Systems Programmer and Consultant from 1978 to 1987. Much of this period was defined by his expertise with CDC mainframe environments.

Bell Labs and Firewall Research

Cheswick joined Bell Labs in 1987. Shortly after his arrival, he and colleague Steven M. Bellovin developed one of the world's first network firewalls. Their research and published papers culminated in the book Firewalls and Internet Security, one of the earliest works to describe firewall architecture in detail and widely regarded as a seminal text in the field. During this same period, Cheswick and Bellovin also created one of the world's first honeypots, deploying it to detect and trap an attempted intrusion into their network.

Internet Mapping Project and Lumeta

In 1998, while still at Bell Labs — by then operating under Lucent Technologies — Cheswick initiated the Internet Mapping Project with the assistance of Hal Burch. The project applied tracerouting techniques to construct large-scale connectivity graphs of global networks, enabling comprehensive internet mapping for the first time. This research led directly to the founding of Lumeta in 2000, a spinoff company in which Cheswick served as co-founder and Chief Scientist.

AT&T Shannon Lab

Cheswick joined AT&T Shannon Lab in 2007 and remained there until 2012.

Notable Work and Interests

Beyond his professional research, Cheswick has developed interactive exhibits for science museums, including the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey. He has written on the topic of authentication, including the article "Rethinking Passwords," published in Communications of the ACM in 2013. His personal interests include model rocketry, lock picking — both electronic and physical — and the development of visualizations of films. Cheswick lives in a farmhouse in Flemington, New Jersey, which he has outfitted as an electronic smart home equipped with a voice synthesizer that relays information ranging from mailbox status to stock updates.