Month: October 2010

The annual UW Computer Science & Engineering Industrial Affiliates Meeting took place on October 27th and 28th. On the 27th, more than 100 representatives from Affiliates companies participated in a day of research presentations, and more than than 250 Seattle-area alumni joined for an evening of posters. There were also awards. UW security and privacy lab PhD students Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, and Franzi Roesner won an award for their poster on car security, and PhD student Roxana Geambasu and graduate student Amit Levy won an award for their poster on Comet: An Active Distributed Key-Value Store.

The photo at the right, taken by UW CSE faculty member Bruce Hemingway, shows (from left) Karl, Alexei, and Franzi discussing their poster with an attendee.

An article at AolNews warns of five new classes of cyber attacks, research into two of which were pioneered by UW security and privacy lab researchers. In 2008 UW researchers, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, published an award-winning paper at the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy evaluating the computer security risks and challenges with implantable medical devices. Earlier this year, UW and UC San Diego researchers published a paper at the 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy describing the results of an extensive experimental analysis of a modern car. This research is forward-looking. No known threats have manifested to date, and UW researchers are now focused on developing defenses for futures medical devices and automobiles.