Author: Franziska Roesner

Security Lab PhD candidate Yael Eiger has spent the last few years studying technology in U.S. carceral contexts, particularly how it impacts the security and privacy of the people who do not choose the technologies they (and we) are subjected to — including pre-incarceration (e.g., surveillance technology), during incarceration (e.g., communication options while incarcerated), post post-incarceration (e.g., risks from targeted digital scams). Her body of work has recently been covered in several venues, including a UW News Q&A and an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting. We highly recommend you check out these stories for accessible summaries of Yael’s important work!

Security Lab members had the opportunity to present to and connect with Allen School Industry Affiliates members at this year’s Research Showcase. Thanks to PhD students Grace Brigham and Henry Wong for presenting in the session on “Security in the Age of AI”, and thanks to PhD students Abhinaya S.B. and Henry Wong for presenting at the poster session!

Congratulations in particular to Henry Wong, for his and his collaborators’ (Yoshi Kohno and Jeff Nivala) recognition as a runner-up for the evening’s Madrona Prize!

Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Read more about the Allen School’s Grand Challenge on security, privacy, and safety in this FAQ with Profs. Franzi Roesner and Sewoong Oh: Link to FAQ in the Allen School blog.

Several members of the UW Security Lab — along with several friends and alumni — attended and presented their work last week in Malmö, Sweden at the Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. These included:

• PhD student Grace Brigham, presenting work on “Examining Risks Through a Characterization of the AI Companion Application Ecosystem: A Stratified Sample from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store” (with collaborators Lucy Qin and Yoshi Kohno)
• Faculty member Franzi Roesner, on behalf of PhD alum Tina Yeung, presenting work on “Is This AI? Longitudinal Analysis of Strategies Used for AI Detection on Two Subreddits” (with collaborators Galen Weld and Jaron Mink).

We are excited to welcome two new members of the UW Security and Privacy Research Lab: Dr. Alisha Ukani, a postdoctoral scholar working with Prof. Franzi Roesner and the UW’s Center for an Informed Public, as well as Megan Gross, a new PhD student also working with Prof. Roesner. Welcome to Seattle!

We’re excited and grateful to have recently had two of our UW Security Lab students hosted as visitors to the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy in Bochum, Germany! Grace Brigham visited in mid-August, presenting on “Online Safety for At-Risk Users in the Age of AI”. Yael Eiger visited in late August, presenting on “‘Studying up’ in Security and Privacy” and has stayed for a few weeks hosted by Carmela Troncoso.

This is not our first connection to MPI-SP: Security Lab alum Kentrell Owens is currently doing his postdoc there with Yixin Zou, and Security Lab faculty member Franzi Roesner spent her sabbatical a few years ago collaborating (sadly mostly remotely) with Asia Biega and Lin Kyi.

While we’re at it: congratulations to Dr. Kyi on her recent dissertation defense, and — even more connections! — we’re excited that she will move on to a postdoc at EPFL with incoming faculty member and UW Security Lab alum Miranda Wei. Here’s to more visits and collaborations between our labs and alums!

Security Lab faculty members Franzi Roesner and David Kohlbrenner recently spoke with UW News about their work studying the security of emerging agentic browsers, specifically, how these browsers can allow malicious websites to leverage the agent to violate the same-origin policy. Read the article here: “Some agentic AI browsers come with major cybersecurity risks, UW study finds“. More details about the project are available here: https://agent-security.cs.washington.edu/agentic_browsers_sop.html

Among the awards given out at the Allen School graduation are student and faculty teaching awards. This year, Security Lab members were honored in both categories! Evan Lam (Security Lab MS ’26 graduate) won the Bob Bandes Teaching Award and Nirvan Tyagi (Security Lab faculty member) won the (newly renamed — congrats, Hal!) Hal Perkins Undergraduate Teaching Award. Congratulations to Evan and Nirvan, and thank you to the many CSE 484 (Undergraduate Computer Security) students who have joined us for part of their time in the Allen School!

We are so excited to introduce this year’s Security and Privacy Research Lab graduates:

• Pranav Gopalkrishnan, MS
• Evan Lam, MS
• Dr. Rachel McAmis, PhD
• Dr. Tina Yeung, PhD

It has been such a pleasure having you all as colleagues and lab members, and we can’t wait to see what you all do next!! Congratulations!! 🎓

Congratulations to Dr. Tina Yeung, who successfully defended her dissertation on June 2 and graduated with her PhD on June 12!! Her dissertation is titled “Measuring Harms and Empowering Users: Case Studies in Online Advertising and Generative AI” and was advised by her committee consisting of Franziska Roesner (chair, UW), Joe Calandrino (CMU), Tadayoshi Kohno (Georgetown), Emily Tseng (UW), and Mako Hill (GSR, UW). Dr. Yeung will be joining the California Privacy Protection Agency, known as CalPrivacy, very soon.