Security and Privacy Research Lab

We are very excited to say that Franzi Roesner has accepted a tenure-track faculty position within the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering Department! UW was very fortunate to get Prof. Roesner, as she had numerous other very attractive offers. Prof. Roesner will bring huge strengths and a new, permanent perspective to the UW CSE computer security and privacy efforts. We are all very excited about this! And congratulations to Prof. Roesner too!

Alisha Saxena, a senior from Interlake High School, was named the First Runner-Up in the 2014 Central Sound Regional Science & Engineering Fair. Alisha’s project, “Analyzing and Preventing Quick Response Code Based Malware and Phishing Attacks for Smartphones,” was conducted in UW CSE’s Security and Privacy Research Laboratory, where she has been mentored by Ph.D. student Franzi Roesner and professor Yoshi Kohno.

In addition to being named First Runner-Up, Alisha also won first place in the Computer Science category and the Intel Excellence in Computer Science award. We reported in December on Alisha’s recognition as a Winner in the 2014 National NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing.

Alisha and the Grand Champion – Meera Srinivasan, a junior at Interlake High School – will receive an all-expense-paid trip to represent the Central Puget Sound region at the 2014 Intel International Science & Engineering Fair in Los Angeles this May.

Congratulations, Alisha!

Congratulations to Columbia University professor (and UW CSE PhD alum) Roxana Geambasu for winning the prestigious U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award! To quote the NSF web page, the CAREER award is “the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.” Congratulations Roxana!

UW CSE PhD student Franzi Roesner gave a great talk today at Financial Crypto 2014. The talk focused on her work analyzing the usage of Snapchat. (More info in her paper, http://www.franziroesner.com/pdf/snapchat-FC2014.pdf.)

As a lab, we are very excited about the FTC’s Internet of Things workshop, which is going on today. The focus of the workshop is on security and privacy, and the four panels are on: the smart home, connected health and fitness, connected cars, and privacy and security — topics that we have been working on at UW for years now.

In his opening remarks, Keith Marzullo from the NSF included a slide on exemplar security and privacy projects for cyber-physical systems. The slide listed five example projects, three of which come from the UW CSE Security and Privacy Research Lab. Keith discussed UW’s work on analyzing the security and privacy properties of wireless implantable medical devices and, in particular, he cited our Oakland 2008 paper (in collaboration with UMass and BIDMC). He then went on to cite our experimental security analyses of a modern car, which appeared at Oakland 2010 and USENIX Security 2011 (in collaboration with UCSD). And, finally, he discussed the lab’s collaborative work with Howard Jay Chizeck (UW EE department) on secure telerobotics.

Congratulations to Tammy Denning for a great talk at ACM CCS 2013, where she presented her paper “Control-Alt-Hack: The Design and Evaluation of a Card Game for Computer Security Awareness and Education.” Elements of the game drew from some of Tammy’s other projects, e.g., her research on medical device security and computer security for devices in the home. (More info on Tammy’s web page, http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tdenning/ .)

The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created by the computer systems research community in 2013 to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.

At the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles today, UW CSE Ph.D. alumna Roxana Geambasu, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University, was recognized as runner-up in the inaugural Ritchie Award competition.

Roxana received her PhD from UW CSE in 2011.

Congratulations to Franzi Roesner for giving the opening talk at MIT’s invitation-only “Rising Stars in EECS” conference: https://www.rle.mit.edu/risingstars/.

Franzi focused her presentation on her systematic evaluation of the web tracking ecosystem, but she also briefly touched on some of her other areas of computer security research, including: automotive computer security, permission granting in modern operating systems, secure embedded UIs, and security and privacy for augmented reality systems. Franzi’s web page is here: http://www.franziroesner.com/.

Last week Temitope Oluwafemi presented his work on analyzing the security of an unlikely target — the CFL light bulbs attached to home automation systems. The light bulbs were not designed for network connectivity. But, by connecting them to home automation-controlled dimmers, they can become reachable by unauthorized parties. The paper answers questions about the possibility to remotely compromise light bulbs, cause fires, seizures and other physical injuries. Fortunately, no fires were started, but we did pop/char some bulbs. It is available here: https://sites.google.com/site/oluwafemit/HomeAutomationFinal.pdf. (This work was also with Sidhant Gupta, Shwetak Patel, and Tadayoshi Kohno, and appeared at the Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER) workshop.)

The UW Tech Policy Lab is a unique, interdisciplinary collaboration that aims to enhance technology policy through research, education, and thought leadership. The new venture — enabled by a founding gift of $1.7 million from Microsoft — brings together experts from the University’s School of Law, Information School, and Computer Science and Engineering.

The Tech Policy Lab was launched Thursday evening at an event keynoted by University of Washington President Michael Young, Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith, and Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Head of Microsoft Research Peter Lee, plus the three UW co-directors of the Lab: Ryan Calo from the School of Law, Batya Friedman from the Information School, and Yoshi Kohno from Computer Science and Engineering.

Learn more about the Tech Policy Lab here. See photographs of the launch event here. Read a Seattle Times article here.