Maryam Rostamipoor

I am a Security Engineer and Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stony Brook University (graduating May 2026), advised by Dr. Michalis Polychronakis. I have 8+ years of combined industry and research experience specializing in cloud and platform security, Kubernetes and container hardening, secrets management, static analysis, and penetration testing. I am a Catacosinos Fellow (2025) and NDSS Fellow (2025).

My research focuses on building production-grade security systems deployed across hundreds of real-world applications:

• LeakLess — In-memory encryption protecting sensitive data against memory-disclosure and transient-execution attacks (Spectre/Meltdown) in 91% of serverless applications with only 2.8–8.5% overhead. Published at NDSS 2025.
• KubeKeeper — Cryptographic Secrets protection for Kubernetes using RBAC and Admission Webhooks, eliminating excessive-permission exposures across 498 real-world applications with zero runtime overhead. Published at EuroS&P 2025.
• LeakGauge — IaC-aware static analysis framework (CodeQL) tracing sensitive data flows across serverless deployments, identifying 1,400+ secret-exposure paths across 500+ applications — designed as a CI/CD security guardrail.
• Confine — Automated seccomp policy generation for containers via static binary analysis, filtering 144+ system calls on average and mitigating 28 Linux kernel CVEs. Published in Computers & Security, 2023.

Prior to my Ph.D., I was Head of Software Security at Sadad Electronic Payment Company, leading threat modeling, security architecture reviews, and penetration testing across a national-scale banking ecosystem. I also performed offensive security assessments at APA Research Center and the Stock Exchange Organization, manually exploiting XSS, SQL injection, SSRF, IDOR, authentication bypass, and RCE vulnerabilities in production financial infrastructure.

I’m passionate about translating cutting-edge security research into practical defenses. Outside of research, I love cooking, yoga, working out, and spending time with friends.