Among the Stars at SpaceX

Information Networking Institute alumnus Henry Howland (MS34) landed a dream job as a security analyst at SpaceX. Working for the aerospace company had been his goal all along. He had engineered it to happen, starting with enrolling in the INI’s Master of Science in Information Security (MSIS) program. 

“I came to Carnegie Mellon with the purpose to get the kind of background I would need to be able to do intense cybersecurity on space systems,” said Howland. “That’s the streak that carried through most of my work I did at the INI. I thought I really needed to codify what I’m trying to do here.”  

“Henry’s story illustrates what it means to be a true engineer at heart,” said Dr. Dena Haritos Tsamitis, director of the INI and Barbara Lazarus Professor of Information Networking. “He reverse-engineered his career, starting first with where he wanted his graduate school journey to end: the job listings on the SpaceX website.”

“From there, I systematically tried to check off all the boxes that are there on that job description,” said Howland.

“Carnegie Mellon provided me with a really in-depth fundamental understanding of networking protocols that make up how this side of the world operates, which is something not a lot people understand,” continued Howland.

He selected courses to cover the systems side of cybersecurity, including the topics of embedded systems, software systems, and reverse engineering, as well as the advanced Linux programming used in satellites.

“The threading lab in my embedded systems course was a great project. It answered a lot of questions about how operating systems work,” explained Howland. “It taught me how exactly a syscall works and scheduling algorithms to a certain extent, as well as how a mutex in a thread works under the hood.”

In his courses, Howland learned about reading an assembly, using a debugger in multiple courses, and finding vulnerabilities in code.

“It was very clear to me early on that Henry had a plan for his career. In one of our early meetings in Fall 2021, he already articulated his desire to go work for SpaceX after graduation. I was very impressed by how enterprising he was,” said Maverick Woo, a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon CyLab and Howland’s independent study advisor.

For his independent study, Howland served as the lead for a student team working with the 2022 MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) competition.

“Essentially, MITRE released (i) a technical specification containing both functional requirements and security requirements and (ii) a demo system to help seed the development effort by the participating teams. Then, our students extended the demo system into a full system that aims to completely meet the provided specification,” Woo explained via email.

Capture the flag (CTF) competitions interested Howland and allowed him to practice new skills. He also interned at Raytheon in vulnerability research. 

“I had used Hack the Box [cybersecurity training program] to better understand penetration testing, but [prior to graduate school] I hadn’t been doing anything low level, such as binary exploitation. The deep systems background that CMU gives you prepares you for it. Now that’s my favorite category,” said Howland.

Howland attended DEF CON in 2021 and 2022, where he participated in events such as in the Hack-a-Sat Aerospace PiSat Challenge, sponsored by Aerospace Corporation, and attended the 2022 StarLink talk covering hardware hacking. Attendees could see a proof-of-concept of a hacker at the Starlink terminal with custom-made hardware.

“At DEF CON, you get to be very hands-on with technology. I definitely got a lot more out of DEF CON in 2022 just because of all of the coursework and extracurricular activities that CMU made available to me,” said Howland.

Howland graduated in December 2022 with his new job offer. He had transitioned from graduate school to his dream job in 15 months. A cross-country move was his final obstacle. Over the course of the week, he traveled from Pittsburgh to settle into a new apartment in Los Angeles.

He began his position at SpaceX in January 2023. Mission accomplished.