Justin Cappos, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering and a faculty member at the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, has been selected by the Fulbright Commission Iceland for a Distinguished Scholar Award in Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure for academic year 2026-2027.
The award is part of a competitive program jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Fulbright Iceland, meant to foster partnerships between U.S. and Icelandic institutions on shared security challenges.
During his award year, Cappos plans to work with Icelandic government institutions to integrate software supply chain security technologies developed at his Secure Systems Lab at NYU Tandon, working alongside collaborators at the University of Wisconsin and the Open Law Library, a nonprofit that helps governments publish laws and regulations online.
The tools are designed to ensure that software has not been secretly tampered with somewhere between when it is written and when it is actually used
Cappos and those same collaborators have already applied the technology to the legal supply chain, developing cryptographic security tools to protect official legal documents from cyberattacks and tampering. Deployed in more than a dozen U.S. jurisdictions including Washington D.C. and Baltimore, the technology was adopted by Maryland in 2025, making it the first U.S. state to do so.
Cappos’ security designs also protect the software infrastructure used by major technology companies including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. He is the creator of five open-source security projects: TUF, which protects software update systems against attackers who have compromised the underlying repository, Uptane, which applies similar protections to millions of automobiles worldwide, in-toto, SBOMit, and gittuf.
In 2024, Cappos was elected to the Governing Board of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as the Security Community Individual Representative.
"Justin's work securing software and legal infrastructure has already made a difference in communities across the United States," said Juan de Pablo, NYU's Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science & Technology and Executive Dean of NYU Tandon. "Seeing that expertise now extend to Iceland is exactly the kind of global impact we strive for at Tandon."
"Cybersecurity is one of the most critical and fast-moving areas in computer science today, and Justin's work sits at the center of it," said Martín Farach-Colton, Chair of the NYU Tandon Computer Science and Engineering Department. "He is a wonderful ambassador for NYU Tandon and the NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and this award is a testament to the real-world impact of the research coming out of his lab."
"Iceland is a small, technically advanced nation with a digitally savvy populace. I'm excited to work directly with Icelandic government institutions to help integrate the software supply chain security tools we've developed at NYU," said Cappos. "This kind of real-world deployment is exactly what drives our research, taking security technology out of the lab and into the systems that people actually depend on."
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship international academic exchange initiative, fostering knowledge sharing and promoting peaceful relations between the United States and other nations.
