Author: Franziska Roesner

Members of the Security Lab took advantage of the beautiful Seattle late-summer weather today to go on a great hike at Wallace Falls.

Congratulations to Kiron Lebeck and Lucy Simko for their excellent talks at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) this week!

Kiron presented his work “Towards Security and Privacy for Multi User Augmented Reality: Foundations with End Users”, in collaboration with Security Lab undergraduate Kimberly Ruth and faculty members Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner. You can watch the video of Kiron’s talk here and read the paper here.

Lucy presented her work on “Computer Security and Privacy for Refugees in the United States”, in collaboration with Security Lab alumna Ada Lerner, Samia Ibtasam, and Security Lab faculty members Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno. You can watch the video of Lucy’s talk here and read the paper here.

Congratulations once again to Security and Privacy Lab undergraduate Kimberly Ruth! This month she was named both a 2018 Goldwater Scholar — a huge honor! — as well as one of the 2018 UW Husky 100. Read more about both of these awards over at Allen School News: Goldwater Scholarship, Husky 100. Congratulations Kimberly!!

Congratulations to both Camille Cobb and Kiron Lebeck for successfully passing their General Exams this week, officially making them PhD Candidates!

The lab celebrated by going out for ice cream at Molly Moon’s.

Kimberly Ruth was named as a Finalist for the 2018 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award! This is a very competitive award that “recognizes undergraduate students in North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.” Kimberly’s current research focus is on security and privacy for emerging augmented reality (AR) technologies, and she’s been a member of the Security and Privacy Lab since she was a freshman. Kimberly has had an incredible year, adding this award to the Mary Gates Research Scholarship, the SWSIS Scholarship, and the WRF Fellowship. Congratulations Kimberly on this huge honor!

To celebrate the end of the academic quarter, Security and Privacy Lab members participated in an improvisation team building workshop facilitated by an instructor from Unexpected Productions. Not only is improv funny and fun, it also provides surprisingly relevant lessons for research and collaboration — such as the “Yes, and…” mindset for brainstorming.

Congratulations to Security Lab alum Alexei Czeskis and the team he led at Google for launching Google’s Advanced Protection Program! According to the website, “the Advanced Protection Program safeguards the personal Google Accounts of anyone at risk of targeted attacks – like journalists, activists, business leaders, and political campaign teams.” Thanks to Alexei and his team for helping keep Google’s users safe. Consider signing up to better protect your own Google account!

Security and Privacy Lab co-director Professor Franzi Roesner is interviewed on the CBC Radio show “Spark” about potential risks with emerging augmented reality technologies. Listen to the full interview “Going beyond Pokemon Go: Preparing for an augmented reality future” (direct audio link here), and learn more about the UW Security and Privacy Lab’s efforts to secure future AR technologies here.

The Security and Privacy Lab hosted two sessions of research talks at the Allen School’s Industry Affiliates Research Day today. Presentations included:

• Kiron Lebeck on “Securing Augmented Reality Output”
• Peter Ney on “Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing. Compromising Computers with Synthetic DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More”
• Camille Cobb on “Privacy in Online Dating”
• Eric Zeng on “End User Security & Privacy Concerns with Smart Homes”
• Ivan Evtimov on “Robust Physical-World Attacks on Deep Learning Models”
• Lucy Simko on “Recognizing and Imitating Programmer Style”
• Alex Takakuwa on “Moving to New Devices in the FIDO Ecosystem”
• Peter Ney on “SeaGlass: Enabling City-Wide IMSI-Catcher Detection”

Thanks to all the speakers for the great talks and to all the attendees for joining us!

Security Lab co-director Franzi Roesner traveled to Cambridge, MA this week to speak at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech 2017 conference and receive an “Innovator Under 35” award. See the video of her talk on security and privacy for emerging augmented reality technologies here or embedded below.