Security and Privacy Research Lab

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.

DARPA’s Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group brings together roughly 30 of the top minds in academia and industry. Their task is to identify and explore emerging inflection points broadly related to computing in the context of national security. Members are not just leaders in their own fields, but leaders in all of information science and technology. UW CSE has an amazingly strong presence at ISAT, including Security Lab Professor Franzi Roesner. Read the CSE News article here.

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!