He is the primary author and technical architect of BIND 8. He started maintaining BIND 4 in 1988 while working for the Digital Equipment Corporation. He hired many of the people who wrote BIND 9 and BIND 10. BIND, which stands for Berkeley Internet Name Domain, is the most widely used DNS software on the Internet, and on Unix-like systems it is the de facto standard.
Vixie’s extensions allowed the DNS to scale beyond the original design and added the first elements of security. He created the first system that used DNS as a database for reputation information, and more recently, for response policy and rate limiting.
Vixie also founded the first anti-spam company, MAPS (for “Mail Abuse Prevention System”), a California nonprofit with the goal of stopping email abuse; started the first neutral commercial Internet exchange (the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, or PAIX); and founded the Internet Software Consortium, which coordinates and publishes open source implementations of core DNS, DHCP, and other protocols.
He served on the American Registry for Internet Numbers Board of Trustees from 2005 to 2013, and as its Chairman in 2008 and 2009. Vixie, the CEO of Farsight Security, Inc., was a founding member of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Root Server System Advisory Committee and the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee, on which he currently serves.
Vixie earned his PhD from Keio University in Japan for work related to the DNS and its security extensions (DNSSEC).
