Security and Privacy Research Lab

Adam Lerner gave a great and well-received talk today at the USENIX Security Symposium. The USENIX Security Symposium is one of the leading publication venues in the computer security research field. Adam presented a paper, co-authored with Anna Kornfeld Simpson (co-student first author) and faculty members Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno, titled “Internet Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Trackers: An Archaeological Study of Web Tracking from 1996 to 2016”. This research used the Wayback Machine‘s archive of the Internet to study the evolution of web tracking over time. Read the paper here and check out the associated web page here.

Anna Kornfeld Simpson presented at tonight’s WIPs session at USENIX Security. Her paper on an archealogical study of web tracking from 1996-2016, with Adam Lerner, Franzi Roesner, and Yoshi Kohno, will be presented tomorrow. For tonight’s talk, Anna presented some additional results about the evolution of the web over time.

Congratulations to Adam Lerner for passing the UW CSE General Exam today! Next stop: final defense and dissertation filing. Great report and presentation! Congratulations Adam!

Congratulations to Gennie Gebhart for graduating this year with a Master of Library and Information Science from the Information School! And double congratulations on joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a researcher! We will miss having you as part of the lab, and know that the larger security and privacy community is lucky to have you at the EFF!

We are excited to announce that Shrirang Mare will join UW CSE in the fall as a postdoc. Shrirang is receiving his PhD from Dartmouth College, and his interests include security and privacy issues in pervasive computing, particularly in healthcare, usable security, and continuous authentication. At UW he will be working with Profs. Richard Anderson, Yoshi Kohno, and Franzi Roesner at the intersection of digital financial services and computer security. Welcome Shrirang!

Congratulations to Gennie Gebhart for winning this year’s Information School 2016 Capstone Presentations Research Award! Among all the iSchool capstone projects, Gennie’s research on security, privacy, and censorship received this highest recognition. Congratulations Gennie!

As part of his PhD Dissertation, lab alumnus Miro Enev studied whether a computer attached to a car’s internal computer network could “fingerprint” (identify) the driver. Wired got excited about the work and interviewed Miro. See the resulting article here. A conference version of the upcoming paper, co-authored with lab member Alex Takakuwa, alumnus Karl Koscher, and faculty member Yoshi Kohno will appear at PETS 2016. Great job team!

Congratulations to UW CSE Security Lab member Lucy Simko! Lucy received one of this year’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program supports outstanding student researchers pursuing Masters and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics who demonstrate the potential to have a significant impact in their fields. Nearly 17,000 students applied for a total of 2,000 fellowships awarded nationwide. Receiving an NSF Fellowship is a huge honor. Congratulations Lucy!

UW CSE Security Lab alumnus Karl Koscher was an invited panelist today at the RSA conference, in San Francisco. Karl participated in a panel entitled “Do We Need Cyber-Ratings for the Auto Industry?” Karl drew on his deep expertise in automotive security. In 2010 and 2011 he, along with other UW and UCSD co-authors, published two of the first papers analyzing the computer security properties of modern automobiles. That work led to significant impact in both industry and governemnt, was covered in two NOVA TV episodes, and was featured on 60 Minutes.

Security Lab member Kiron Lebeck gave a great talk today at HotMobile 2016! The talk was about his work on computer security for future augmented reality systems, with Profs. Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno. The paper is online here. The talk really was great — everyone was leaning back and watching the talk, vs working on their computers 🙂 . Great job Kiron!