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Eugene Howard Spafford (born 1956), known as Spaf, is an American distinguished professor of computer science at Purdue University and a computer security expert.
Spafford serves as an advisor to U.S. government agencies and corporations. In 1998, he founded and was the first director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University.
During the formative years of the Internet, Spafford made significant contributions to establishing semi-formal processes to organize and manage Usenet, then the primary channel of communication between users, and to defining the backbone cabal. Spafford initiated the Phage List as a response to the Morris Worm, one of the earliest .
Spafford wrote or co-authored four books on computer and computer security, including Practical Unix and Internet Security for O'Reilly Media, and over 150 research papers, chapters, and monographs. In 1996, he received the Award of Distinguished Technical Communication from the Society for Technical Communication for Practical Unix and Internet Security. In 2024, his book Cybersecurity Myths and Misconceptions for Addison-Wesley was named to the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame.
As a PhD advisor, Spafford has advised 27 students to graduation. Among other projects, he designed the Open Source Tripwire tool coded by his undergraduate student Gene Kim. Spafford was the chief external technical advisor to the company Tripwire during their first few years. He was also an advisor to Dan Farmer who coded the freeware Computer Oracle and Password System (COPS) tool as a Purdue undergraduate.
In 2009, Spafford discussed on C-SPAN an article in The New York Times that looked at how the Internet had been a conduit for many types of cybercrime.
Recent work from Spafford has shown how to deceive adversaries and thus make computing systems more secure, drawing on his multi-disciplinary expertise in information security and psychology.
Spafford is on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association and is the former chairperson of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) US Public Policy Committee. He was a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee from 2003 to 2005 and an advisor to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Spaf is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (1997), American Association for the Advancement of Science (1999), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2000), ISC2 (2008), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020); he is a Distinguished Fellow of the Information Systems Security Association (2009).
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