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Every year, the National Academy of Engineering invites roughly 100 of the top engineers under the age of 45 from around the country to participate in its Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, a two-and-a-half day event focused on cutting-edge research in various fields of engineering. The 2015 symposium, which is taking place this week in Irvine CA, features a diverse range of topics, including the search for exoplanets, metamaterials, forecasting natural disasters, and cybersecurity and privacy.

It is an honor to be invited to the symposium, and an even higher honor to be invited to speak. This year, professor Franzi Roesner, co-director of UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Lab, delivered one of the opening talks of the program.

In her presentation, Computer Security and Privacy: Where Human Factors Meet Engineering, Franzi highlighted the challenge of designing technologies that match user expectations when it comes to security and privacy. She described a new model for granting permissions, “user-driven access control,” that removes the burden of making decisions from the user in favor of having the system automatically grant permissions based on how the user naturally interacts with existing applications.

The 2015 UW Engineering Lecture Series – three evening public lectures sponsored by the UW Alumni Association – is all CSE this year! And, moreover, two out of three are from the Security Lab!

• Wednesday October 7: Franzi Roesner, “The Invisible Trail: Pervasive Tracking in a Connected Age”
• Wednesday October 21: Dieter Fox, “Our Robotic Future: Building Smart Robots that See in 3D”
• Wednesday November 3: Yoshi Kohno (along with Batya Friedman from the Information School and Ryan Calo from the School of Law), “Responsible Innovation: A Cross Disciplinary Lens on Privacy and Security Challenges”

All lectures are at 7:30 p.m. in Kane Hall 130.

Congratulations Dr. Temitope Oluwafemi! Dr. Oluwafemi presented his final PhD defense today and will be joining Intel’s prestigious Engineering Leadership Program, where he will focus on the Internet of Things. Tope’s dissertation was titled “Using Component Isolation to Increase Trust in Mobile Devices” and was co-advised by Security Lab faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner. Congratulations Tope!

Security Lab alum Karl Koscher, of 60 Minutes car hacking fame, is in the news once again for exposing the vulnerabilities of motor vehicle systems with a team at University of California, San Diego, where he is doing a postdoc with UCSD CSE professors and UW CSE Ph.D. alums Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker.

This time, Karl and his fellow researchers demonstrate for Wired magazine and the USENIX security conference a new threat for motorists: common plug-in devices such as those provided by insurance firms to monitor a vehicle’s location, mileage and speed.

Read more in the Wired article here.

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!

Congratulations to security lab members Ian Smith and Tope Oluwafemi! Ian graduated today with a Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering. Tope participated in the Electrical Engineering PhD graduation ceremony and hooding and is scheduled to give his final PhD defense talk later this summer. Congratulations to both of you for all that you have accomplished!

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!