Security and Privacy Research Lab

Huge congratulations to Security Lab MS graduate Grace Brigham, who received multiple awards at this year’s graduation: in addition to an Outstanding Senior Award, she was honored with the Outstanding Master’s Thesis Award for “Violation of my body: Perceptions of non-consensual (intimate) imagery.” That work, which Brigham completed under the supervision of Security Lab professor Tadayoshi Kohno, provided new insights into people’s perceptions of AI-generated non-consensual imagery that are already being used to inform national and international conversations about how to mitigate harms associated with such use of AI. The paper will be presented at the 20th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2024).

(Details and photo from Allen School News, photo by Kerry Dahlen.)

The UW Security and Privacy Research Lab is incredibly excited to congratulate our many graduates this year! It has been a tough couple of years for everyone, and our BS, MS, PhD, and Postdoc graduates have nevertheless conducted incredible research and contributed to a great lab community. We will miss you all, and we can’t wait to see where your careers take you!

Congratulations to:

• Micheal Chung (BS, advised by David Kohlbrenner) –> Software Engineer @ Apple
• Grace Brigham (MS, advised by Yoshi Kohno) –> Software Engineer @ Microsoft
• Vadym Denysenko (BS, advised by Franzi Roesner) –> Data Engineer @ MAQ Software
• Chongjiu Gao (MS, advised by Franzi Roesner) –> Software Engineer @ F5
• Theo Gregersen (MS, advised by Franzi Roesner) –> PhD program @ CMU
• Shaoqi Wang (MS, advised by Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner) –> PhD program @ Northeastern

Congratulations to Miranda Wei for presenting at the La Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) in France. Miranda presented her work (collaborative with Google and UW researchers) on “Understanding Help-Seeking & Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse”. More information and full replay about the CNIL’s Privacy Research Day 2024 can be found here: https://www.cnil.fr/en/privacy-research-day-2024-topics-registration.

Congratulations to Alexandra Michael, Gregor Haas, Tina Yeung, and Yael Eiger for passing their PhD Qualifying Exams this quarter! Alexandra presented her work on “Assembly Transformations for Countering Instruction-Centric Microarchitectural Timing Channels”. Gregor presented his work on “Hardware Sharing for Keystone Enclaves”. Tina presented her work on “Analyzing the Accessibility of Online Advertisements”. Yael presented her work on “Why Johnny Spent Money on Roblox: Manipulative Design in the Roblox Monetization Ecosystem”; Yael will officially pass Quals once she completes the required breadth coursework next year.

Congratulations to everyone for earning their MS degrees and completing the first of three major milestones on the path to a PhD!

Congratulations to Kentrell Owens for passing his General Exam and officially becoming an Allen School PhD candidate! Kentrell’s past and proposed work studies consumer protection for underserved communities. He proposed a user-focused approach that prioritizes questions posed by people directly impacted by the technologies.

Security Lab faculty co-directors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner are excited to announce their co-edited special issue of the IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine on “Security and Privacy in the Metaverse”. You can check out the magazine here and you can read Franzi and Yoshi’s guest editor introduction here. Thank you to those who submitted and helped review papers!

Congratulations to Kaiming Cheng for passing his General Exam and officially becoming an Allen School PhD candidate! Kaiming’s past and proposed work studies and addresses security, privacy, and safety challenges with emerging AR/MR technologies. The photo shows Kaiming celebrating with his dissertation committee.

Congratulations to Rachel McAmis and Rachel Hong for passing their qualifying exams! Rachel McAmis, a member of the UW Security and Privacy Research lab and the UW Tech Policy lab, presented her work on “Privacy Threats and Concerns of Commercial Satellites”. Rachel Hong, a member of the UW Security and Privacy Research lab and the Washington AI Lab (WAIL), presented her work on “Evaluation of targeted dataset collection on racial equity in face recognition”. You can find more information on these projects by reading Rachel McAmis’s paper and Rachel Hong’s paper.

Huge congratulations to Miranda Wei for winning a coveted and well-deserved Google PhD Fellowship!! More information and all of this year’s winners on Google’s page here: https://research.google/outreach/phd-fellowship/recipients/.

Welcome to our new PhD students, Maddie Burbage and Yael Eiger, who have recently joined the UW Security Lab!