Security and Privacy Research Lab

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.

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.