Bill Woodcock (born August 16, 1971 in San Francisco, California, United States) is the executive director of Packet Clearing House, the international organization responsible for providing operational support and security to critical Internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system; the chairman of the Foundation Council of Quad9; the president of WoodyNet; and the CEO of EcoTruc and EcoRace, companies developing electric vehicle technology for work and motorsport. Bill founded one of the earliest Internet service providers, and is best known for his 1989 development of the anycast routing technique that is now ubiquitous in Internet content distribution networks and the domain name system.
Activities
Early electronic prepress
Woodcock entered the computer industry via the advent of desktop publishing. He was doing prepress work for the University of California Press when the Macintosh computer was released in 1984, and he switched to the then-nascent field of desktop publishing and electronic prepress. In 1985, he began working with AppleTalk networks, necessary to interconnect Macintosh computers running desktop publishing software with the digital imagesetters which produce the plates from which books are printed, and by 1986 he was speaking on the subject of desktop publishing and electronic prepress at conferences.
Beginning in 1985, Woodcock volunteered with the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group (BMUG), providing technical assistance to its members, working on the production of its biannual newsletters, and assisting Bernard Aboba with the administration of its FidoNet-node BBS and moderating the global MacNetAdmin echo. In 1989, he collaborated with BMUG Programming SIG chair Greg Dow to produce what may be the first instance of Database publishing: a catalog of BMUG's shareware archive, printed directly from a FileMaker database to negatives on a LinoTronic 300 PostScript imagesetter.
Woodcock continued his interest in publishing through college and beyond, studying Book Arts at the UC Santa Cruz Cowell Press under George Kane, doing the illustrations for his book Networking the Macintosh, and subsequently collaborating with his publisher parents to provide book designs and cover art for some of their books. Woodcock was one of the founders of Netsurfer Digest, the first online periodical about the World Wide Web, and served as its production manager from 1994 through 2005.
Early Internet engineering
In 1987, Woodcock began building the dot-com era Internet backbone network Zocalo, which had its origins in the toasternet he began constructing while working at Farallon Computing in the mid-1980s. When the network grew to encompass Santa Cruz as well as Berkeley in 1989, he began using anycast routing to distribute network traffic between the servers in the two locations. Throughout the 1990s, he continued to pioneer IP anycast IGP and EGP-based topological load-balancing techniques. Together with Mark Kosters he proposed at the 1996 Montreal IEPG that the root DNS servers be migrated to IP anycast, and this work has provided the basis upon which root DNS servers have been deployed since the late 1990s.
In the early 2000s, Woodcock was an early proponent of reputation-based routing security and encapsulated much of that work in the "Prefix-List Sanity Checker" toolset which was used by most of the largest Internet networks to validate proposed BGP routing announcements in the interregnum between the RPSL and RPKI eras.
In 2010 and 2011, with Rick Lamb, who had previously built the signing system that places DNSSEC cryptographic signatures on the DNS root zone, Woodcock built the first global-scale FIPS 140-2 Level 4 DNSSEC signing infrastructure, with locations in Singapore, Zurich, and San Jose. Woodcock has also done networking protocol development work, and has developed networking products for Cisco, Agilent, and Farallon.
Cybersecurity and critical infrastructure
In 2001, together with Sean Donelan and John Todd, Woodcock constructed the "Inter-Network Operations Center Dial-By-Autonomous-System-Number" (INOC-DBA) infrastructure protection hotline communications system. At its peak, it interconnected more than 2,800 NOCs and CERTs, and was notably the first inter-carrier SIP VoIP network, and the first telephone network of any kind to provide service on all seven continents.
Woodcock was one of the two international liaisons in Estonia assisting Hillar Aarelaid and the CERT-EE during Russia's 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by coordinating the international effort to intercept and block inbound attack traffic before it reached the Estonian border.