Security and Privacy Research Lab
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
Security lab member Kiron Lebeck gave a great Quals Talk today at UW CSE. The Quals Talk is a major milestone along the path to a PhD and what qualifies one to receive a Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering, along with all the relevant coursework. Congratulations Kiron for this major milestone!
Security and Privacy lab co-director Yoshi Kohno was shocked today at soccer when everyone on the team entered the field wearing a shirt with his photo on it! What a fun surprise!
The first time this photo of Yoshi appeared on a shirt was in 2006, when UCSD decided to play a prank on UW and created “UCSD North — Seattle Branch” shirts. Read more about that history here.
Security Lab alumnus Alexei Czeskis spoke today at Google I/O about Google’s new Security Key. Quoting from the abstract, “Security Key is an inexpensive 2nd factor device which provides the user unphishable security for Google logins and for any other website which implements support. The user carries one device which works across all sites which support the open FIDO U2F protocol.” Great work Alexei and colleagues!
UW CSE’s Melody Kadenko has received the 2015 UW College of Engineering Professional Staff Award.
Melody manages more than 100 research grants from multiple agencies. In her “spare time,” she mentors UW’s National Collegiate Cyberdefense Competition team, and shakes the tin cup to fund the CSE espresso room (appropriating a page from the NPR playbook: “We need $2500 before I quit sending email!”).
A faculty member writes, “Melody uses creativity and persistence to solve any kind of thorny research grant problem.”
A student writes, “Melody has been the single most useful person I’ve met since coming to UW.”
Congratulations Melody!! You totally deserved this!
Security and Privacy lab co-director Franzi Roesner gave the opening remarks at today’s ACM Research Night. ACM Research Night provides an opportunity for UW Computer Science & Engineering undergraduate students to learn what research is all about. Franzi began her talk by discussing her research in computer security and privacy. She then gave some valuable advice to future undergraduate researchers. Here’s to undergraduate research!
Congratulations to Adam Lerner for a great talk at MobiSys 2015! Using a data set of 87 million scans from a mobile phone barcode scanning application, Adam and colleagues analyzed the use of QR codes in the wild. You can read more about this work here. Great job Adam!
Congratulations to Peter Ney! Peter successfully defended his quals project today. Next stop: Generals. Congratulations Peter! Great job!
Sometimes it can be hard to know what your advisors are thinking. Apparently Yoshi was talking about how to avoid shooting yourself in the foot with a bucket of Legos during a research meeting with Kiron and fellow advisor Franzi. Maybe it made sense at the time? The quote was captured for posterity on Franzi’s white board.
Congratulations to Anna Kornfeld Simpson, who won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
Congratulations to Will Scott, who won an Open Technology Fund Information Controls Fellowship!
Learn about the Information Controls Fellowship here.