Dr. Wietse Zweitze Venema

A Dutch programmer and physicist he is IBM Research's authority on Internet security. He is best known for writing the Postfix email system, a free and open-source mail transfer agent (MTA) that routes and delivers electronic mail, intended as an alternative to the widely used Sendmail MTA. He also wrote TCP Wrapper, a host-based networking ACL system, used to filter network access to Internet Protocol servers on (Unix-like) operating systems such as Linux or BSD. It allows host or subnetwork IP addresses, names and/or ident query replies, to be used as tokens on which to filter for access control purposes. He collaborated with Dan Farmer to produce the computer security tools SATAN and The Coroner's Toolkit. He studied Physics at the University of Groningen, graduating with a Ph.D. but soon changed his career path to Computer Science. He spent 12 years at Eindhoven University as a systems architect in the Mathematics and Computer Science department, and spent part of this time writing tools for Electronic Data Interchange. Since emigrating to the U.S. in 1996 he has been working for the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York State. He has received several awards for his work including: Security Summit Hall of Fame Award (July 1998); SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award (November 1999); NLUUG Award (November 2000); Sendmail Milter Innovation Award (November 2006); The 2008 Free Software Foundation Award for the Advancement of Free Software (March 2009); and Information Systems Security Association's (ISSA) Hall of Fame award (October 2012) for lifetime achievements which include Postfix, the Coroner's Toolkit and many other information security applications. He co-authored the book, ?Forensic Discovery? with Dan Farmer (2005), ISBN-13: 978-0201634976 ISBN-10: 020163497X 1st Edition.