Security and Privacy Research Lab

Security Lab undergraduate researcher Kimberly Ruth spoke today at UW’s Undergraduate Research Symposium. Kimberly discussed her work on security and privacy for emerging augmented reality technologies, in collaboration with Security Lab PhD student Kiron Lebeck and lab co-directors Professors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner, which will also appear later this month at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) 2017. Great talk, Kimberly!

Members of the security lab visited Paris, France this week for the 2nd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P).

At the conference, security lab alumna Gennie Gebhart (now at the Electronic Frontier Foundation) presented her work with faculty member Yoshi Kohno and an anonymous co-author on “Internet Censorship in Thailand: User Practices and Potential Threats”. Read the full paper here.

Security lab PhD student Eric Zeng presented “Confidante: Usable Encrypted Email – A Case Study With Lawyers and Journalists”, collaborative work with PhD student Ada Lerner and faculty member Franzi Roesner. Read the full paper here and check out the Confidante encrypted email tool and source code here.

Congratulations to Security Lab undergraduate researcher Kimberly Ruth for winning a Scholarship for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS)! In fact, Kimberly is the first winner of the program’s first named scholarship, the Rebecca Gurley Bace SWSIS Scholarship. The SWSIS program provides scholarships of up to $10,000 for women studying for their Bachelors and Masters degrees in fields relating to information security. Kimberly’s research focuses on security and privacy for emerging augmented reality systems. Read the official award citation here. Congratulations again, Kimberly!

Congratulations to UW Security Lab undergraduate Kimberly Ruth for winning the coveted Mary Gates Research Scholarship! The Mary Gates Scholarship is a highly competitive scholarship intended to facilitate the research experience of University of Washington undergraduate students. Kimberly is actively conducting research at the intersection of augmented reality and computer security, a research area led by security lab faculty member Franziska Roesner. In fact, Kimberly is a co-author of an upcoming paper on that topic, to appear at this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2017. Kimberly conducted that research during her freshman and sophmore years at UW. Her paper, co-authored with her PhD student mentor Kiron Lebeck and her faculty advisors Franziska Roesner and Yoshi Kohno, will appear on the UW Augmented Reality and Security page soon. Congratulations Kimberly!!

Modeled after TED, the USENIX Enigma Conference is one of the hottest computer security conferences out there. Today it was announced that UW Security Lab professor Franziska Roesner will co-chair Enigma 2018. Stay tuned for an exciting Enigma 2018 program!

A big congratulations to senior security lab PhD Student Ada Lerner! After receiving multiple tenure-track faculty offers from top liberal arts colleges, Ada has now decided to join the computer science faculty at Wellesley College. Quoting from Wikipedia, “According to the 2017 U.S. News and World Report rankings, Wellesley is ranked 3rd for liberal arts college and 1st for women’s colleges.” This is big news! Congratulations Ada! And congratulations Wellesley!

Congratulations to Security and Privacy Lab Co-director Professor Franziska Roesner! Franzi has just received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, for her work on computer security for augmented reality systems. As the National Science Foundation says, “the CAREER Award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty.” Congratulations Franzi!

Security and Privacy Lab PhD Student Eric Zeng won tonight’s TGIF paper airplane contest. Eric spent years preparing for this contest, and created a masterful, long-flying paper airpline. In addition to building paper airplanes, Eric loves security and privacy research. Check out his upcoming IEEE Security and Privacy Europe paper, co-authored with PhD student colleague Ada Lerner and their advisor Franzi Roesner, here.

GREPSEC is a workshop in security and privacy for women and members of underrepresented groups. It will be held in San Jose, California on May 20 and 21. Security and Privacy Lab co-director Yoshi Kohno is chairing the student application process. Please consider applying! The application deadline is March 2nd.

Some people call the USENIX Enigma Conference the hottest new computer security conference out there. Enigma is like a security-focused TED conference. Security and Privacy Lab co-director Professor Franzi Roesner was invited to speak this year, and she chose to speak about her work on computer security and privacy for journalists and lawyers. Her talk was an end-to-end tour through her work with journalists and lawyers, starting with formative interviews, continuing into the design and implementation of a new email encryption tool, and then covering more lessons through summative user evaluations.

If you’re familiar with the classic paper “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt”, then you will appreciate this comment from one Twitter follower: “I think that @franziroesner basically just made it possible for Johnny to encrypt!”

The video of her talk is not online yet, but it will likely be posted online here soon.