Justin Cappos
Assistant Professor
Computer Science & Engineering
- Phone: (718) 260-3116
- Email: jcappos@poly.edu
- Location: 10.026 (2 MetroTech Center, 10th Floor)
- Website:
http://isis.poly.edu/~jcappos/
https://seattle.cs.washington.edu/
Education
University of Arizona, Class of 2008
Ph.D., Computer Science
Courses Taught
Fall 2012: CS 392 / CS 6813 (Intro Security), CS 9163 (Application security)
Fall 2011: CS 392 / CS 6813 (Intro Security), CS 9413 (Systems security seminar)
Research Interests
Practical security, virtualization, cloud computing, software update systems, testbeds
Other Publications
Selected publications:
"Retaining Sandbox Containment Despite Bugs in Privileged Memory-Safe Code."
J. Cappos, A. Dadgar, J. Rasley, J. Samuel, I. Beschastnikh, C. Barsan, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson.
The 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '10).
Chicago, IL, 2010."Survivable Key Compromise in Software Update Systems."
J. Samuel, N. Mathewson, J. Cappos, R. Dingledine.
The 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '10).
Chicago, IL, 2010."Seattle: A Platform for Educational Cloud Computing."
J. Cappos, I. Beschastnikh, A. Krishnamurthy, T. Anderson.
The 40th Technical Symposium of the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '09).
Chattanooga, TN USA, March 2009"A Look In the Mirror: Attacks on Package Managers."
J. Cappos, J. Samuel, S. Baker, J. Hartman.
The 15th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS '08).
Alexandria, VA, 2008."San Fermin: Aggregating Large Data Sets using Dynamic Binomial Trees."
J. Cappos, J. Hartman.
The 5th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation (NSDI '08).
San Francisco, CA, 2008."Proper: Privileged Operations in a Virtualised System Environment."
S. Muir, L. Peterson, M. Fiuczynski, J. Cappos, J. Hartman.
USENIX '05 Annual Technical Conference.
Anaheim, CA, 2005.Biography
Dr. Justin Cappos joined NYU Poly in 2011 as a tenure-track assistant professor where he specializes in the security of practically deployed systems. Much of his interest in practical software deployments and security comes from real-world experience. After graduating from high school, Dr. Cappos served as an active duty member of the US Army for 7 years. Following his military service, Dr. Cappos pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. His graduate research primarily focused on the security of software update systems, including his dissertation work on the package manager Stork. Stork has been extensively deployed over the past 7 years, including on PlanetLab where it has managed over a half million virtual machine instances (cloud tenants). However, perhaps a better indication of impact is that architectural and security improvements in Stork were adopted by the three most popular Linux package managers, APT, YaST, and YUM. As a result, the majority of Linux systems leverage security innovations pioneered through his research.
Dr. Cappos built and maintains Seattle, the largest open academic research testbed. This software allows thousands of students safe access to diverse Internet-connected computational resources on thousands of laptops, desktops, phones, and cloud environments around the world. Over the past three years, the Seattle testbed has been used in about two dozen security, networking, or distributed systems classes. This platform has resulted in top publications in conferences on security and education and has been the subject of more than 50 presentations to educational audiences. Seattle is one of the top ranked educational resources on the SIGCOMM educational website. Assignments using Seattle are being included in the most popular textbook on networking.