Fred Cohen

Frederick B. Cohen
Fields	Computer virology
Alma mater	University of Southern California University of Pittsburgh Carnegie-Mellon University
Known for	Computer Virus research

Frederick B. Cohen (born 1956) is an American computer scientist and best known as the inventor of computer virus defense techniques.

In 1983, while a student at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering (currently the Viterbi School of Engineering), he wrote a program for a parasitic application that seized control of computer operations, one of the first computer viruses, in Leonard Adleman’s class. He wrote a short program, as an experiment, that could "infect" computers, make copies of itself, and spread from one machine to another. It was hidden inside a larger, legitimate program, which was loaded into a computer on a floppy disk -- something few computers sold today can accommodate anymore.

One of the few solid theoretical results in the study of computer viruses is Cohen's 1987 demonstration that there is no algorithm that can perfectly detect all possible viruses.

Cohen also believed there are positive viruses and he had created one called the compression virus which spreading would infect all executable files on a computer, not to destroy, but to make them smaller.

He has many other works related to computer viruses. Cohen now runs a computer security firm.

Papers

• 1991, Trends In Computer Virus Research
• 1991, A Case for Benevolent Viruses
• 1991, The Computer Security Encyclopedia - Computer Viruses
• 1992, A Formal Definition of Computer Worms and Some Related Results
• 1989, Models of Practical Defenses Against Computer Viruses
• 1988, On the Implications of Computer Viruses and Methods of Defense
• 1984, Computer Viruses - Theory and Experiments
• 1989, Models of Practical Defenses Against Computer Viruses

References

• Cohen, F., 1987. "Computer Viruses Theory and Experiments," Computers and Security, vol. 6, pp. 22--35.

External links

• A short biography
• Interview with Fred Cohen