Month: November 2013

As a lab, we are very excited about the FTC’s Internet of Things workshop, which is going on today. The focus of the workshop is on security and privacy, and the four panels are on: the smart home, connected health and fitness, connected cars, and privacy and security — topics that we have been working on at UW for years now.

In his opening remarks, Keith Marzullo from the NSF included a slide on exemplar security and privacy projects for cyber-physical systems. The slide listed five example projects, three of which come from the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab. Keith discussed UW’s work on analyzing the security and privacy properties of wireless implantable medical devices and, in particular, he cited our Oakland 2008 paper (in collaboration with UMass and BIDMC). He then went on to cite our experimental security analyses of a modern car, which appeared at Oakland 2010 and USENIX Security 2011 (in collaboration with UCSD). And, finally, he discussed the lab’s collaborative work with Howard Jay Chizeck (UW EE department) on secure telerobotics.

Congratulations to Tammy Denning for a great talk at ACM CCS 2013, where she presented her paper “Control-Alt-Hack: The Design and Evaluation of a Card Game for Computer Security Awareness and Education.” Elements of the game drew from some of Tammy’s other projects, e.g., her research on medical device security and computer security for devices in the home. (More info on Tammy’s web page, http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tdenning/ .)

The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the computer systems research community in 2013 to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles today, UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Roxana Geambasu, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, was recognized as runner-up in the inaugural Ritchie Award competition.

Roxana received her PhD from UW CSE in 2011.

Congratulations to Franzi Roesner for giving the opening talk at MIT’s invitation-only “Rising Stars in EECS” conference: https://www.rle.mit.edu/risingstars/.

Franzi focused her presentation on her systematic evaluation of the web tracking ecosystem, but she also briefly touched on some of her other areas of computer security research, including: automotive computer security, permission granting in modern operating systems, secure embedded UIs, and security and privacy for augmented reality systems. Franzi’s web page is here: http://www.franziroesner.com/.