Jason Croft

PhD Student
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801

Email: croft1 (at) illinois (dot) edu

Links: [Publications] [Experience] [Awards] [Courses]

I am a second year Phd student in the Department of Computer Science at UIUC advised by Professor Matthew Caesar. I am currently spending time at Microsoft Research in Redmond where I am working with Ratul Mahajan and Madan Musuvathi.

Prior to UIUC, I completed my undergraduate degree at Boston College in 2009 and was advised by Gang Tan and Robert Signorile. I interned at Microsoft in the summer of 2008 on the Forefront Security team and worked as a Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET) on the Active Directory team from 2009-2010.

I am interested in system reliability and security, with a recent focus on exploring how the timing properties of systems can affect reliability and predictability. Within security, I am particularly interested in information leakage and information flow.

Outside of research, I enjoy running, motorcycling, reading random Wikipedia articles, and playing the pipe organ (especially JS Bach and JA Alain). As an undergraduate at Boston College, I studied organ with Timothy Zimmerman.

Publications

Jason Croft and Matthew Caesar. Towards Practical Avoidance of Information Leakage in Enterprise Networks. In 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec '11), San Francisco, California, USA, August 2011. [pdf]

Jason Croft and Robert Signorile. Secure Distribution of Confidential Information via Self-Destructing Data. In 8th World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS) International Conference on Data Networks, Communication, Computers (DNCOCO '09), Baltimore, Maryland, USA, November 2009. [pdf]

Jason Croft and Robert Signorile. A Self-Destructing File Distribution System with Feedback for Peer-to-Peer Networks. In 9th World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS) International Conference on Applied Computer Science (ACS '09), Genova, Italy, October 2009. [pdf]

Gang Tan and Jason Croft. An Empirical Security Study of the Native Code in the JDK. In 17th USENIX Security Symposium 2008 (USENIX Security '08), San Jose, California, USA, July 2008. [pdf] [tech report]

Jason Croft and Gang Tan. Security Analysis of the Native Code in Suns JDK. In 23rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC '07), Work-in-Progress session, Miami, Florida, USA, December 2007. [pdf]

Experience

Research Intern, Microsoft Research, May 2011 - Present
Software Design Engineer in Test (SDET), Microsoft Corporation, Active Directory, Aug 2009 - Aug 2010
Vice President, ACM, BC Chapter, September 2008 - May 2009
SDET Intern, Microsoft Corporation, Forefront Security, Summer 2008
Teaching Assistant, Boston College

MT435 Mathematical Programming, Fall 2008 (with Prof. Dan Chambers)
CS383 Algorithms, Spring 2008 (with Prof. Sergio Alvarez)
CS361 Information Security, Fall 2007 (with Prof. Gang Tan)

Awards/Fellowships

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, Honorable Mention, 2011
Chirag Foundation Fellowship, UIUC, 2010
Phi Beta Kappa Society, inducted 2009
Boston College Venture Competition 2009, 2nd place (NetGene: Browser-Based Distributed Computing)
CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Honorable Mention, 2009
Dean's Scholar Finalist, Boston College, 2008
Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Boston College, 2008-2009

Graduate Coursework

CS598MCC Advanced Internetworking, Spring 2011 (with Prof. Matt Caesar)
CS525 Advanced Distributed Systems, Spring 2011 (with Prof. Indranil Gupta)
CS523 Advanced Operating Systems, Spring 2011 (with Prof. Sam King)
CS591RHC Security Reading Group, Fall 2010
CS598PBG Advanced Computer Networks, Fall 2010 (with Prof. Brighten Godfrey)
CS573 Graduate Algorithms, Fall 2010 (with Prof. Jeff Erickson)

Last updated: Feb-23-2012