Congratulations to our 2022 Graduates!!!

The UW Security and Privacy Research Lab is incredibly excited to congratulate our many graduates this year! It has been a tough couple of years for everyone, and our BS, MS, PhD, and Postdoc graduates have nevertheless conducted incredible research and contributed to a great lab community. We will miss you all, and we can’t wait to see where your careers take you!

This year’s graduates include:

  • Prof. Dr. Pardis Emami-Naeini is completing her postdoc in our lab. Pardis has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Duke University.
  • Dr. Chris Geeng completed their PhD, with a dissertation entitled “Analyzing Usable Security, Privacy, and Safety Through Identity-Based Power Relations”. Chris will begin a postdoc appointment at NYU, working with Damon McCoy.
  • Dr. Lucy Simko completed her PhD, with a dissertation entitled “Humans and Vulnerability During Times of Change: Computer Security Needs, Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities”. Lucy will begin a postdoc appointment (details TBA).
  • Dr. Eric Zeng completed his PhD, with a dissertation entitled “Characterizing and Measuring ‘Bad Ads’ on the Web”. Eric has already begun a postdoc appointment at CMU, working with Lujo Bauer.
  • Michelle Lin and Savanna Yee graduated from our BS/MS program with their MS degrees.
  • Rachel McAmis and Jeffery Tian graduated with the BS degrees. We’re excited that Rachel will remain at UW, joining our PhD program.
  • Though they are not yet leaving us, Kaiming Cheng, Michael Flanders, Kentrell Owens, and Miranda Wei all passed their Qualifying Exams this year, earning their MS degrees and completing the first of three major milestones on the path to a PhD.

Congratulations, everyone!!! We are so proud of you!

Photo caption: Lucy, Eric, Chris, Savanna, Michelle, and Pardis at our lab graduation celebration
Photo caption: Lucy, Eric, Franzi, Yoshi, and Chris before the official graduation

Announcing the Hertzbleed Attack

Security lab faculty member David Kohlbrenner and collaborators announced the Hertzbleed Attack today. The team found a way to mount remote timing attacks on constant-time cryptographic code running on modern x86 processors (see Twitter thread). From the website: “Hertzbleed is a new family of side-channel attacks: frequency side channels. In the worst case, these attacks can allow an attacker to extract cryptographic keys from remote servers that were previously believed to be secure.” The Hertzbleed paper will appear in the 31st USENIX Security Symposium. Congratulations to the team!