Security and Privacy Research Lab

UW CSE revolutionized data collection and analysis in low-resource settings with the creation of the Open Data Kit (ODK), a suite of free, open-source mobile tools. ODK – a project spearheaded by the late professor Gaetano Borriello – has been deployed in more than 40 countries to monitor elections, to conserve natural resources, to track health care outcomes, and much more. Now, UW CSE is poised to do for money management what we did for data with the launch of our new Digital Financial Services Research Group. The new effort is funded by the Gates Foundation, under the primary directorship of CSE faculty member Richard Anderson. Security Lab co-directors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner are co-leading the computer security elements of this new effort. Read more about this new group here.

The Technology Alliance hosts a monthly Discovery Series seminar, with the stated goal of inviting leading researchers to give talks that can help inform local business and civic leaders about new and important technical advances. UW CSE professor and security lab co-director Franzi Roesner gave this month’s presentation. Franzi spoke about online tracking and smartphone security. Read more online here.

The UW CSE Security Lab participated in today’s CSE Open House, for visiting K-12 students. The lab’s hosted activity: a sequence of cryptographic puzzles. Check out the puzzles here. And what did the students get, if they solved the puzzles? An SSL (Super Smart Learner) certificate. A big thank you to Anna Kornfeld Simpson, Adam Lerner, Lucy Simko, Eric Zeng, Camille Cobb, and Alex Takakuwa for preparing the puzzles and the SSL certificates.

The National Science Foundation hosts a periodic (once every few months, in general) invited lecture on computer security. UW CSE Security Lab co-director Yoshi Kohno gave this months invited lecture, on the topic of Computer Security and the Internet of Things.

Congratulations Alex Takakuwa for delivering a great quals talk today! The quals talk is the key milestone for receiving an MS at UW, en route to a PhD. Congratulations Alex!

UW CSE professors Yoshi Kohno and Franzi Roesner and Ph.D. alum Tamara Denning (now on the faculty at the University of Utah) are among the lead authors of a new white paper that examines policy issues associated with emerging augmented reality technologies. The paper is the first of its kind published by the UW’s Tech Policy Lab, which brings together faculty and students from UW CSE, the School of Law, the iSchool and other units on campus to explore the potential implications of emerging technologies in a way that is useful for policy makers. More information available here.

The National Science Foundation recently chose to highlight the efforts of UW CSE’s Security Lab, and the grants of security lab faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner, in an article entitled “Benefits and risks of the ‘Internet of Things.'” Read the full article here.

The UW CSE Security Lab spent the afternoon locked in a room, for fun. We were locked in a room themed after “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, and had to try to escape by solving puzzles. A lot of fun!

Security Lab alum Karl Koscher has been named runner-up for the second annual SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis in Computer and Information Security for his UW Ph.D. thesis, “Securing Embedded Systems: Analyses of Modern Automotive Systems and Enabling Near-Real Time Dynamic Analysis.” The award was announced at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, the flagship annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC), held this week in Denver, Colorado. Congratulations Karl!

NOVA visited the UW CSE Security Lab again, this time for its documentary CyberWar Threat, which aired last night. The UW CSE component begins around minute 29, and includes appearances by UW CSE security lab members and alumni Alexei Czseskis, Melody Kadenko, Tadayoshi Kohno, Karl Koscher, Temitope Oluwafemi, Franziska Roesner, Alex Takakuwa, Tariq Yusuf.