Justin Cappos

Justin Cappos (born February 27, 1977) is a computer scientist and cybersecurity expert whose data-security software is employed by a number of widely used open-source cloud computing projects.
Cappos is a professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University Tandon School of Engineering. His research centers on systems, software update systems, security, and virtualization, with a focus on real-world security problems, often in large open-source projects.

His Ph.D. dissertation in computer science at the University of Arizona was on the Stork Project, a software package manager he built with John H. Hartman, professor in the department of computer science.

While a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington in 2009, Cappos developed peer-to-peer computing platform Seattle, which allows device-to-device connectivity in a decentralized network. For this and other research "Popular Science" in 2013 recognized Cappos as one of its "Brilliant 10" scientists under 40.

In 2010 he developed The Update Framework (TUF), a flexible security library designed to be added to software updaters to make them resilient to compromise.

"Docker", an open-source system for deploying Linux containers, integrated TUF in 2015 when it launched Docker Content Trust. Docker Content Trust is an implementation of Docker's Notary project, which is built on TUF. Notary can both certify the validity of the sources of Docker images, and encrypt the contents of those images.

Flynn, an open-source platform as service (PaaS) for running applications in production employs TUF for secure distribution of its components.

In 2013, credit card processing company Square began integrating TUF with the open-source file-server RubyGems in an effort to prevent a repeat of that year's hack of RubyGems.org, which interrupted the widely used Heroku cloud application architecture.

In 2014 Cappos developed PolyPasswordHasher, a password storage scheme that prevents efficient password cracking.