Rob Johnson is a Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University and conducts research on Security, Big Data Algorithms, and Cryptography. He is director of the Security, Programming Languages, And Theory (SPLAT) lab at Stony Brook, the Cryptography Lab at the New York Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT), and the Smart Grid Cyber-Security Testing Lab of the New York Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC).
He does theoretical work with an impact on the real world. He developed BetrFS, a file system that uses recent advances in data structures to improve performance on some operations by over an order of magnitude. He invented the quotient filter, a high-performance alternative to the Bloom filter for Big Data applications. He founded cache-adaptive analysis, a theoretical framework for designing and analyzing algorithms that dynamically share memory with other processes. He broke the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) crypto-system used in almost all DVD players and TVs. He co-authored CQual, a static analysis tool that has found dozens of bugs in the Linux kernel and has been used to audit the entire Debian Linux distribution for format-string bugs.
Rob completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2006.