Gene Spafford

Eugene Howard Spafford (born 1956), commonly known as Spaf, is an American professor of computer science at Purdue University and a leading computer security expert.

A historically significant Internet figure, he is renowned for first analyzing the Morris Worm, one of the earliest computer worms, and his role in the Usenet backbone cabal. Spafford was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee 2003-2005, has been an advisor to the National Science Foundation (NSF), and serves as an advisor to over a dozen other government agencies and major corporations.

Spafford attended State University of New York at Brockport completing a double B.A. in both Mathematics and Computer Science in 3 years. He then attended the School of Information and Computer Sciences (now the College of Computing) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his M.S. in 1981, and Ph.D. in 1986 for his design and implementation of the original Clouds distributed operating system kernel.

During the early formative years of the Internet, Spafford made significant contributions to establishing semi-formal processes to organize and manage Usenet, then the primary channel of communication between users, as well as being influential in defining the standards of behavior governing its use.

At Purdue, Spafford has a joint appointment as a professor of computer science and as professor of electrical and computer engineering, where he has served on the faculty since 1987. He is also a professor of philosophy (courtesy), and a professor of communication (courtesy). He is also Executive Director of the Purdue CERIAS (Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security) and was the founder and director of COAST Laboratory, which preceded CERIAS.

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