Fred Cohen - Biography

Frederick B. Cohen (born 1957) 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.

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.

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

• 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