Author: Franziska Roesner

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.

Ongoing research by Security Lab PhD student Yael Eiger, along with collaborators Meira Gilbert and Anna-Maria Gueorguieva, into how AI chatbots can be used to find personal information about individuals was covered by Eileen Guo in MIT Technology Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/13/1137203/ai-chatbots-are-giving-out-peoples-real-phone-numbers/.

UW Security Lab PhD student Grace Brigham is quoted in this article from the Indicator (“AI companion apps are a nonconsensual nightmare”) about her research — with collaborators Yoshi Kohno and Lucy Qin — into how ads on Meta’s platforms promote AI companion apps that enable the nonconsensual use of others’ likenesses. More about Grace’s and collaborators’ work here: https://gracebrigham.substack.com/p/how-ai-companion-apps-enable-and

Read Security Lab PhD student Yael Eiger‘s blog post on technology in Washington prisons over at the Washington History Project: The Desire and Disdain for Technology in WA Prisons. Yael’s dissertation work is exploring technology (especially harms) within the U.S. carceral system.

Congratulation to Security Lab PhD alum Dr. Miranda Wei on receiving the Allen School’s 2025 William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award! You can read their dissertation “Against Online Abuse and Toward Sociotechnical Security & Privacy” here: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/items/74f4ea0d-a0ea-47c7-a9a7-6e4e5dfb3727.