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Internet Experts selected to fill top organizational posts

Below the release is background information about the IETF, the IESG, the IAB, and the people mentioned in the release. Note: organizational names are used for identification purposes only.

LOS ANGELES, CA. April 3, 1998-- Major positions involved in setting standards for the basic technical infrastructure of the Internet were filled here today at the 41st meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Area Directors for the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and members of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the two leadership groups of the IETF, were installed.

The IETF is the international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the protocols and operational characteristics of the Internet. Nearly 1,700 people are attending the meeting, where they are reviewing, discussing, and working on a variety of technical issues affecting the Internet.

Those chosen to represent specific functional working areas in their positions on the IESG were:

General + Chair Fred Baker, Cisco re-appointed
Routing Rob Coltun, FORE new
Transport Vern Paxson, LBL new
User Services April Marine, Sterling Software/NASA new
Security Marcus Leech, NorTel new
Security Jeff Schiller, MIT re-appointed
Applications Keith Moore, Utenn re-appointed
Internet Jeff Burgan, @Home re-appointed

Six members were appointed to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), the organization responsible for oversight of the architecture for the protocols and procedures used by the Internet worldwide. Selected were:

Brian Carpenter, IBM re-appointed
Ned Freed, Innosoft new
Tim Howes, Netscape new
Steve Bellovin, ATT re-appointed
Jon Crowcroft, UCL re-appointed
John Klensin, MCI re-appointed

Candidates were chosen following extensive consultation by the IETF Nomination Committee with members of the IETF community regarding the consensus view of the qualifications appropriate for the positions.

Leaving the IESG are Joel Halpern, Joyce Reynolds, Allyn Romanow, and Mike O'Dell. Leaving the IAB are Robert Elz and Radia Perlman.

Mr. Baker commended the nominating committee and its chair, Mike St. Johns, for its efforts in selecting the candidates for the IESG and IAB positions. He also congratulated the outgoing members of the two groups for their efforts. "These folks will be missed; they worked tirelessly for the betterment of the Internet. Joyce Reynolds is especially noteworthy in that she served on the IESG for ten years, through several major changes in the IETF."

BACKGROUND ON THE IETF/IESG/IAB

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the principal body engaged in the development of new Internet standard specifications. It is a large open international community of individuals who make technical and other contributions to the evolution and smooth operation of the Internet. There is no formal membership in the IETF. It is open to any interested person. Anyone may register for and attend any meeting. The IETF is divided into eight functional areas: Applications, Internet, IP: Next Generation, Network Management, Operational Requirements, Routing, Security, Transport and User Services. Each area has one or two area directors. Each area has several working groups, which is where the actual technical work of the IETF is done. Working groups operate under a charter to achieve a certain goal. That goal may be the creation of an Informational document, the creation of a protocol specification, or the resolution of problems in the Internet. Many working groups disband once they have achieved their goal, so the number and scope of working groups varies at any point in time. Much of the work is handled via mailing lists. The IETF holds meetings three times per year.

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) is responsible for technical management of IETF activities and the Internet standards process. It is made up of IETF area directors. The IESG is directly responsible for the actions associated with entry into and movement along the Internet "standards track," including final approval of specifications as Internet Standards. IESG Members are highly qualified individuals who (along with their employers) make a commitment of time and energies, to levels that at times can exceed 1-2 working days per week, for a two-year period. E-mail addresses for Area Directors of IETF Working Groups, as well as other information about the WGs, may be found at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html <http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html>

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) provides oversight of the architecture of the Internet and its protocols and serves. It also serves, in the context of the Internet standards process, as a body to which the decisions of the IESG may be appealed. The IAB is responsible for approving appointments to the IESG from among the nominees submitted by the IETF nominations committee. The IAB also acts as a source of advice and guidance to the Board of Trustees and officers of the Internet Society concerning technical, architectural, procedural and policy matters pertaining to the Internet and its enabling technologies. For more information, see http://www.iab.org/iab

The IAB, IETF, and IESG are chartered by the Internet Society (ISOC), <http://www.isoc.org> a non-profit, non-governmental international organization providing leadership in the management of Internet related standards, educational, and policy development issues. ISOC's more than 6,000 individual and 120 organizational members around the world make up a veritable who's who of the Internet.

ISOC Trustees are responsible for approving appointments to the IAB from among the nominees submitted by the IETF nominating committee, and for ratifying IETF rules and procedures.

BACKGROUND ON IAB and IESG MEMBERS

IESG MEMBERS

* Fred Baker, Chair, IETF/IESG, has worked in the telecommunications industry since 1978, building statistical multiplexors, terminal servers, bridges, and routers. At Cisco Systems, his primary interest area is the management of congestion for best effort and real time traffic. In addition to product development, as a Cisco Fellow, he advises senior management of industry directions and appropriate corporate strategies.

Baker's principal standards contributions have been to the IETF, but he has contributed to ITU's H.323, and to such industry consortia as WINSOCK II and the ATM Forum. In the IETF, he has contributed to Network Management, Routing, PPP and Frame Relay, the Integrated and Differentiated Services architectures, and the RSVP signaling protocol. He currently serves as the IETF Chair, as well as a technical contributor.

* Jeffrey Burgan, IETF Internet Area Co-Director currently manages the Backbone Engineering Group at @Home Network where he is responsible for the overall design and architecture for the backbone network. Previously, he worked at Bay Networks for nearly two years where he formed and managed the software engineering group responsible for planning and development of the software base for use by ISPs using Bay Networks routers. Before moving to Bay, he worked for six years at the NASA Ames Research Center where he was responsible for the management of the NASA Science Internet network.

Burgan has been an active member of the IETF since 1989, working in the routing protocols and network operations areas. For the past two years, he has served on the IESG as an Internet Area director. He graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.

* Rob Coltun, IETF Routing Area Director, is a principal in the Internet Software Group at FORE Systems where he is responsible for the architecture and implementation of ForeThought internetworking software across FORE's product lines, and for large enterprise and ISP architectures. Coltun started his Internetworking career in the early 1980's during which he worked for BBN on the ARPAnet, later moving on to MITRE where he designed and implemented prototypes for DoD internetworking projects.

Before joining FORE Systems, Coltun was president of RainbowBridge Communications which he formed in 1993 to expand on the consulting, software development and architecture work that he had been doing as an independent consultant. RainbowBridge Communications supplied routing software, system architecture consulting services and protocol development to internetworking companies around the world. As an early contributor to the design and development of the OSPF routing protocol, Coltun became a key contributor to its success. From that experience, he formed the VC routing working group in the IETF which evolved into the P-NNI effort in the ATM Forum.

* Marcus Leech, IETF Security Area Co-Director, has been in the computing and networking industry since 1979. He first "met" the Internet back when it was still the ARPANET, on a visit to SRI in 1980. Leech currently works as a security architect for Nortel Information Systems, a position he has held for the past four years. He started attending IETF meetings 3.5 years ago. Leech is the author of two standards documents (RFCs) in the security area, and currently chairs the authenticated firewall traversal (AFT) working group, also within the security area of the IETF. He is married, with one child, another on the way, and lives in rural Ontario on a 35 acre farm.

* April Marine, IETF User Services Area Director is currently the lead for the NASA Network Information Center, part of the NASA Integrated Services Network (NISN). The NASA NIC concentrates on information infrastructure issues and collaborates to improve the user's interface to NASA's online information. She is also manager of the GLOBE Help Desk, a first-level user support service that serves teachers involved in the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, an international "K-12" environmental studies program that relies heavily on the Internet. Marine has worked for Sterling Software at NASA Ames Research Center for the past five years; previously she worked for several years at the SRI Network Information Center. She is the co-author of several RFCs dealing with a variety of topics relevant to network users and user support organizations.

* Keith Moore, Applications Area Co-director has been active in the IETF since early 1991. He has been active in several working groups dealing with electronic mail and the world wide web. He has authored or co-authored several RFCs, including portions of MIME, SMTP extensions, and delivery status notifications. This will be his second term on the IESG. Prior to his appointment on the IESG, he served as chair of the DRUMS working group. He is currently employed as a Research Associate at the University of Tennessee, where his work focuses on improving accessibility of Internet information resources through replication and name resolution; and in general on scaleable distributed systems.

* Vern Paxson, IETF Transport Area Co-Director, is a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Network Research Group whose research primarily concerns Internet measurement. He also does research on building network intrusion detection systems. He co-chairs IETF working groups on IP Performance Metrics and TCP Implementation, and served on program committees for SIGCOMM '97 and '98; the Third Global Internet Mini-Conference; and the NSF workshops on Internet Statistics, Measurement, and Analysis. Paxson has been the recipient of awards for SIGCOMM and USENIX papers; a co-recipient of two USENIX lifetime achievement awards, for contributions to BSD Unix and the Software Tools project; and won best-of-show in the 1992 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley.

* Jeffrey I. Schiller, IETF Security Area Co-Director received his S.B. in Electrical Engineering (1979) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As MIT Network Manager, he has managed the MIT Campus Computer Network since its inception in 1984. Prior to that, he maintained MIT's Multics timesharing system during the timeframe of the ArpaNet TCP/IP conversion. He is an author of MIT's Kerberos Authentication system. Schiller is also a member of the Privacy and Security Research Group (PSRG) of the Internet Research Task Force. His recent efforts have involved work on the Internet Privacy Enhanced Mail standards (and implementation) as well as releasing a U.S. legal freeware version of the popular PGP encryption program. He is also a founding member of the Steering Group of the New England Academic and Research Network (NEARnet), now part of GTE Internetworking, which provides Internet Access to institutions in New England.

IAB MEMBERS

* Brian E Carpenter, IAB Chair is Program Director, Internet Standards and Technology, in the Internet Division of IBM, based at Hursley Park in the UK. Previously he led the networking group at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, Switzerland, from 1985 to 1996. This followed ten years' experience in software for process control systems at CERN, which was interrupted by three years teaching undergraduate computer science at Massey University in New Zealand. He holds a first degree in physics and a Ph.D. in computer science, and is an M.I.E.E. He is the current Chair of the Internet Architecture Board.

* Steven M. Bellovin is at AT&T Labs, where he does research in networks, security, and why the two don't get along. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1982. Bellovin is the co- author of the recent book "Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker." He received a B.A. degree from Columbia University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While a graduate student, he helped create netnews. For this, he and the other creators were awarded the 1995 Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award. Bellovin has been a member of the IAB since 1996.

* Jon Crowcroft is a professor of networked systems in the Department of Computer Science, University College London, where he is responsible for a number of European and US funded research projects in Multi-media Communications. He has been working in these areas for over 17 years. Crowcroft authored "Open Distributed Systems" (UCL Press/Artech House). With Mark Handley, he is the co-author of "WWW: Beneath the Surf" (UCL Press). He graduated in Physics from Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1979, and gained his MSc in Computing in 1981, and PhD in 1993. He is a member of the ACM, the British Computer Society and the IEEE and a senior member of the IEEE. He is also general chair for the ACM SIGCOMM, and is on the editorial team for the ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networks.

* Ned Freed is co-founder, Chief Development Officer, and Chairman of the Board of Innosoft International, Inc., a company specializing in electronic mail and messaging software. Active in the IETF since 1990, he has authored or co- authored many RFCs in the application and security areas, including the MIME specification, various SMTP extensions, and the MIME security multiparts specification. He has co-chaired several IETF working groups, among them NOTARY and NNTPEXT. Freed graduated with a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.

* Tim Howes is Vice President and Chief Technology Adviser to the Server Product Division of Netscape Communications Corp., in Mountain View, California. Prior to joining Netscape in early 1996, he was a researcher at the University of Michigan. Howes is co-author of the recent book "LDAP: Programming Directory-Enabled Applications with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol" and is one of the originators of the LDAP protocol and API specifications. He has chaired or co-chaired several IETF working groups, including IDS, ASID, and LDAPEXT. Howes received his Ph.D. and M.S.E degrees in Computer Science and Engineering and a B.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan.

* Dr. John C. Klensin is Distinguished Engineering Fellow in MCI's Internet Architecture Department. His activities there include both product design and evaluation for MCI's Internet offerings, and providing advice and leadership on a wide range of Internet-related policy and strategy issues. In the IETF, he has served as chair, co-chair, or document editor for working groups in electronic mail area and for exploratory Birds Of a Feather groups including ones on mailing list management and unsolicited email. He served two terms as Area Director for Applications. His involvement with what is now the Internet began in 1969- 70, when he participated in the working group that created the file transfer protocol (FTP).

For more information, contact:

Steve Coya, Executive Director, IETF 703-620-8990 scoya@ietf.org or
Abel Weinrib, Executive Director, IAB aweinrib@ibeam.jf.intel.com or
Martin Burack, Executive Director, ISOC 703-648-9888 burack@isoc.org