Security and Privacy Research Lab
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
This has been a very productive and busy summer for the UW Allen School Security and Privacy Research Lab! To celebrate the end of summer, the lab ventured on an outing to “Molly Moon’s Homemade Ice Cream”, a short walk from our building. It was a beautiful day, and great ice cream! 🙂
Visiting Cal Poly undergraduate Henry Bowman presented his summer project final presentation at today’s Security Lab meeting, before returning to Cal Poly to finish his Bachelors Degree.
Henry’s work focused on problems related to augmented reality, computer security, and privacy. As part of his summer project, Henry contributed to the Security Lab’s ShareAR project. ShareAR, or the Secure and Private AR Sharing Toolkit, is a project developed by Security Lab member Kimberly Ruth with faculty members Franzi and Yoshi and that enables the secure and private sharing of holographic HoloLens objects with others users. Allen School undergraduate student AJ Kruse also contributed to the project this summer. To learn more about the project, see Kimberly’s 2019 USENIX Security paper and talk.
Great job Henry, and great talk!
The UW Security and Privacy Lab, and the lab’s friends and alumni, were out in force at USENIX Security 2019. On Wednesday, current UW Security and Privacy Lab members presented three papers in the same session:
Below are photos from each of the above talks, as well as from UW Systems Lab alumnus Charlie Reis‘s talk’s (with alumnus Alex Moshchuk) on “Site Isolation: Process Separation for Web Sites within the Browser” and Ivan Evtimov‘s talk on a new smarthome security lab (URL forthcoming).
Congratulations to UW Security and Privacy lab member Christine Chen, advised by Prof. Franzi Roesner, and collaborator (and UW alumnae) Nicki Dell for winning a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2019! USENIX Security is one of the top peer-reviewed conferences in computer security, and this is an incredible honor. The authors are also extremely grateful to the people who participated in their study and for the opportunity to share those voices with the computer security and privacy community.
Read their paper on “Computer Security and Privacy in the Interactions Between Victim Service Providers and Human Trafficking Survivors” here.
In 2018, UW Security and Privacy Lab members Ivan Evtimov and Earlence Fernandes (now faculty at Wisconsin), along with UW Prof. Yoshi Kohno and researchers from Samsung Research North America, Stanford University, Stony Brook University, University of California at Berkeley, and University of Michigan , wrote a now widely sited paper on fooling computer vision classifiers and, in doing so, demonstrated the ability to fool a machine learning system into misidentifying a stop sign as, say, a speed limit sign.
The Science Museum in London asked to include the UW Stop Sign in their exhibit titled “Driverless: Who is in Control?”. If you’re in London, please stop by and check it out!
Congratulations to all UW Allen School Security and Privacy Research Lab PhD Graduates — Dr. Camille Cobb, Dr. Kiron Lebeck, Dr. Peter Ney, and Dr. Alex Takakuwa! Congratulations also to graduating Security Lab undergraduate Mitali Palekar, who also won one of the Allen School’s few Outstanding Senior Awards. What an amazing job everyone!
Photos from before and after PhD hooding below. Post-hooding photo order, left to right: Prof. Franzi Roesner, Dr. Kiron Lebeck, Dr. Alex Takakuwa, Dr. Camille Cobb, Dr. Peter Ney, and Prof. Yoshi Kohno.
Congratulations everyone!! And congratulations to all other graduates as well!!
Congratulations to Dr. Alex Takakuwa for successfully defending his PhD dissertation today! Alex’s PhD work focuses on improving various key open challenges in two-factor authentication, and is a result of significant collaboration with Dr. Alexei Czeskis from Google. Alex will continue at UW as a postdoc, incubating a creative new technology idea. Congratulations Dr. Takakuwa!
Congratulations to UW Security and Privacy Lab PhD student Ivan Evtimov for successfully completing his Quals written and oral exam today! The Quals exam is a major milestone in the PhD process. Congratulations Ivan!
Congratulations to Dr. Camille Cobb for successfully defending her PhD dissertation today! Camille’s PhD work focuses on privacy and security issues that can arise between user-to-user interactions, e.g., in online dating systems. Camille will be joining CMU as a postdoc following graduation, where she will be working with Prof. Lujo Bauer. Congratulations Dr. Cobb!
Congratulations to Dr. Peter Ney for successfully defending his PhD Dissertation today. Peter is a research leader at the intersection of biology and computer security, as well also in the study of privacy and cell-site simulators. See, for example, his USENIX Security paper entitled “Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More“, as well as his PETS paper entitled “SeaGlass: A City-wide Cell-site Simulator Detection Network”. Peter will be staying at UW as a postdoc, working with both the UW Security and Privacy Research Lab and the Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL).