Security and Privacy Research Lab

Security Lab alum Karl Koscher, of 60 Minutes car hacking fame, is in the news once again for exposing the vulnerabilities of motor vehicle systems with a team at University of California, San Diego, where he is doing a postdoc with UCSD CSE professors and UW CSE Ph.D. alums Stefan Savage and Geoff Voelker.

This time, Karl and his fellow researchers demonstrate for Wired magazine and the USENIX security conference a new threat for motorists: common plug-in devices such as those provided by insurance firms to monitor a vehicle’s location, mileage and speed.

Read more in the Wired article here.

Congratulations Dr. Temitope Oluwafemi! Dr. Oluwafemi presented his final PhD defense today and will be joining Intel’s prestigious Engineering Leadership Program, where he will focus on the Internet of Things. Tope’s dissertation was titled “Using Component Isolation to Increase Trust in Mobile Devices” and was co-advised by Security Lab faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Franziska Roesner. Congratulations Tope!

Security lab member Kiron Lebeck gave a great Quals Talk today at UW CSE. The Quals Talk is a major milestone along the path to a PhD and what qualifies one to receive a Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering, along with all the relevant coursework. Congratulations Kiron for this major milestone!

Congratulations to security lab members Ian Smith and Tope Oluwafemi! Ian graduated today with a Masters degree in Computer Science & Engineering. Tope participated in the Electrical Engineering PhD graduation ceremony and hooding and is scheduled to give his final PhD defense talk later this summer. Congratulations to both of you for all that you have accomplished!

Security and Privacy lab co-director Yoshi Kohno was shocked today at soccer when everyone on the team entered the field wearing a shirt with his photo on it! What a fun surprise!

The first time this photo of Yoshi appeared on a shirt was in 2006, when UCSD decided to play a prank on UW and created “UCSD North — Seattle Branch” shirts. Read more about that history here.

Security Lab alumnus Alexei Czeskis spoke today at Google I/O about Google’s new Security Key. Quoting from the abstract, “Security Key is an inexpensive 2nd factor device which provides the user unphishable security for Google logins and for any other website which implements support. The user carries one device which works across all sites which support the open FIDO U2F protocol.” Great work Alexei and colleagues!

UW CSE’s Melody Kadenko has received the 2015 UW College of Engineering Professional Staff Award.

Melody manages more than 100 research grants from multiple agencies. In her “spare time,” she mentors UW’s National Collegiate Cyberdefense Competition team, and shakes the tin cup to fund the CSE espresso room (appropriating a page from the NPR playbook: “We need $2500 before I quit sending email!”).

A faculty member writes, “Melody uses creativity and persistence to solve any kind of thorny research grant problem.”

A student writes, “Melody has been the single most useful person I’ve met since coming to UW.”

Congratulations Melody!! You totally deserved this!

Security and Privacy lab co-director Franzi Roesner gave the opening remarks at today’s ACM Research Night. ACM Research Night provides an opportunity for UW Computer Science & Engineering undergraduate students to learn what research is all about. Franzi began her talk by discussing her research in computer security and privacy. She then gave some valuable advice to future undergraduate researchers. Here’s to undergraduate research!

Congratulations to Adam Lerner for a great talk at MobiSys 2015! Using a data set of 87 million scans from a mobile phone barcode scanning application, Adam and colleagues analyzed the use of QR codes in the wild. You can read more about this work here. Great job Adam!

Congratulations to Peter Ney! Peter successfully defended his quals project today. Next stop: Generals. Congratulations Peter! Great job!