Justin Tomlinson

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Bio

Justin Tomlinson

Ph.D. Student / Software Engineer

My name is Justin Tomlinson and I am a software engineer at Liberty Mutual. My passions in life are academics and computer science and I love being able to combine them into one role that I do everyday.

I have experience in many areas of Computer Science and I am familiar with various programming languages. If I am not familiar with a language or skill, I have the work ethic and the willingness to learn anything that poses a challenge to me.

Undergrad

Florida State University 2016-2018

GPA - 3.76

I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at Florida State University. During my time there, I learned the foundations of the area of Computer Science and excelled academically.

- Graduated Magna Cum Laude
- President’s List x1
- Dean’s List x3

I created the first implementation of an application used to help Tallahassee first responders and continued to work on the development for a brief period of time. Additionally, I was offered a role to perform compiler research in Sweden, in which I accepted and completed.

Graduate

University of Florida 2018-2020

GPA - 3.64

During my time at the University of Florida, I accumulated knowledge on more advanced Computer Science topics including Advanced Data Structures, Computer Networks, Computer and Network Security, and Machine Learning.

Additionally, I worked with the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research on the security of the Android Face Recognition biometric. This work directly resulted in my acceptance into the Ph.D. program.

Ph.D. Research

University of Florida 2021-2022

During my time as a Ph.D. student I was furthering my knowledge in the field of Computer Science and conducting research with the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research on attacks against mobile devices and networks. However, I decided to pursue new career opportunities and ultimately left the program.

Research

Failures of Android Face Unlock
2019-2020

This work was an introduction into mobile security and Android biometrics for me. I looked into weaknesses of all of the biometric authentication methods that Android offered and found that facial recognition was the weakest of them all.

This work led to discoveries that Android’s facial recognition could be broken by simply using a single picture of the phone’s owner as well as suggestions as to fix this issue.

Marlin: Detecting IMSI Catchers
2021-2022

This is the first research that I was exposed to as a Ph.D. student and it led to an entirely different realm of mobile security.

While this is still a work in progress, this work consists of looking at messages passed between cell phone towers and cell phones to detect an adversarial device known as an IMSI catcher that can track a phone using an identifier in a SIM card by pretending to be a real cell phone tower.

Internships

Compiler Internship

Gothenburg, Sweden 2018

NASA Internship

Remote 2020-2021