John Criswell

John Criswell is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He earned both his B.S. in Computer Science (2003) and Ph.D. in Computer Science (2014) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

John’s research interests focus on computer security and novel applications of compiler and operating system technology. John's primary research work is on the Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA). SVA enforces security policies on commodity operating system and application code via compiler instrumentation, thereby providing strong protection against sophisticated attacks. Using SVA, John built the first systems that provide strong automated memory safety protection and complete control-flow integrity enforcement to commodity operating system kernels such as Linux and FreeBSD. More recently, John has used SVA to create the Virtual Ghost system that protects application data and control-flow from a compromised operating system kernel.

Prior to joining the University of Rochester, John was a research programmer and graduate student at the University of Illinois. Before that, John worked at Argus Systems Group, Inc. John’s work at Argus Systems Group included enhancements to the AIX operating system kernel and writing utilities that utilized mandatory access controls to improve system security.