Security and Privacy Research Lab

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.

Security and Privacy Undergraduate Researcher Mitali Palekar was featured in today’s departmental Undergraduate Spotlight. Palekar is a sophomore from Cupertino, California who spent a portion of her childhood in Mumbai, India and is trained in Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance form. Mitali works with Security Lab Professor Franziska Roesner, alongside PhD student mentors Ada Lerner and Eric Zeng. Read the Undergraduate Spotlight about Mitali here.

Security Lab PhD student Alex Takakuwa is currently focused on improving one of the most important (and challenging) aspects of computer security: authentication. Today Alex presented some of his work at the FIDO Alliance meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The FIDO Alliance is an industry association spearheading new efforts to improve authentication worldwide.

The US Federal Trade Commission just announced a competition focused on improving the security of Interent of Things devices. Security and Privacy Lab co-director Professor Yoshi Kohno is going to be one of the judges. If you’re working on IoT security, we encourage you to submit!

Of course we value high-quality, high-impact research. But we in the Security and Privacy Lab have many other interests as well. Sometimes we can be found playing board games, softball, or innertube water basketball. Today a subset of us decided to go skiing. Yay for near perfect conditions! We look forward to our next ski day soon!

The UW Computer Science and Engineering Department has an annual Pumpkin Carving TGIF. What a fun (and messy!) adventure! Check out the pumpkins we carved this year: image here.

Security and Privacy Lab co-director Professor Franzi Roesner makes another appearance today, this time on the Internet radio show This Week in Law. Franzi talked about her research studying the evolution of web tracking over the past 20 years. Check out her interview here: https://twit.tv/shows/twit-bits/episodes/3110.

Security and Privacy Lab co-director Professor Franzi Roesner gave the keynote at tonight’s Fremont Women in Tech meeting. Franzi’s talk focused on her innovative research on security and privacy for augmented reality systems.

Congratulations to UW CSE PhD student Paul Vines for passing his General Exam today. Next stop: PhD! Excellent work!

A team from the UW CSE Security Lab has been intensively studying how web tracking has evolved over time. The team, including co-first authors Adam Lerner and Anna Kornfeld Simpson along with faculty members Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno, presented their work at the USENIX Security Symposium a couple of weeks ago. Their research has been picked up by the popular press, including USA Today and TechCrunch, as well as IEEE Spectrum and radio and TV networks. Read their paper here or check out the project web page here here.