Security and Privacy Research Lab

Security Lab PhD student Yael Eiger received an Honorable Mention for the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship. This is a major honor. Congratulations, Yael!!

Congratulations to Security Lab students Miranda Wei and Tina Yeung, along with faculty members Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno, for receiving an Honorable Mention Award for their paper at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), titled “‘We’re utterly ill-prepared to deal with something like this’: Teachers’ Perspectives on Student Generation of Synthetic Nonconsensual Explicit Imagery”. The paper’s abstract:

Synthetic nonconsensual explicit imagery, also referred to as “deep-fake nudes”, is becoming faster and easier to generate. In the last year, synthetic nonconsensual explicit imagery was reported in at least ten US middle and high schools, generated by students of other students. Teachers are at the front lines of this new form of image abuse and have a valuable perspective on threat models in this context. We interviewed 17 US teachers to understand their opinions and concerns about synthetic nonconsensual explicit imagery in schools. No teachers knew of it happening at their schools, but most expected it to be a growing issue. Teachers proposed many interventions, such as improving reporting mechanisms, focusing on consent in sex education, and updating technology policies. However, teachers disagreed about appropriate consequences for students who create such images. We unpack our findings relative to differing models of justice, sexual violence, and sociopolitical challenges within schools.

You can read the full paper at this link. Miranda will soon travel to attend CHI in Japan and present the paper.

Many members of the Security Lab (and friends and at least one alum) greatly enjoyed the Allen School’s annual ski day yesterday!

Kaiming Cheng gave a great talk on “User Comprehension and Comfort with Eye-Tracking and Hand-Tracking Permissions in Augmented Reality” at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (USEC) earlier this week. Check out the paper at https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/usec25-5.pdf.

Congratulations to soon-to-be-Dr. Rachel McAmis on passing the UW General Exam and advancing to PhD candidacy! Her research, with the UW Security & Privacy Research Lab and the UW Tech Policy Lab, is focused on satellites and computer security.

Congratulations to Grace Brigham for presenting her work on case studies of generative AI’s use in journalism at the NeurIPS 2024 workshop on Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR)! This work was conducted with Chongjiu Gao, Yoshi Kohno, Franziska Roesner, and Niloofar Mireshghallah.

Here is the link to the paper and the poster for more details!

Super congratulations to Tina Yeung (Security Lab PhD student), Yoshi Kohno (Security Lab faculty member), and Franzi Roesner (Security Lab faculty member) for being awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2024 Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Madrid, Spain!!! See Tina receiving the award in the image below, and read the paper here: On the (In)Accessibility of Web Ads: Measurement and User Study.

Congratulations to Rachel Hong for a excellent talk at EAAMO, hosted in San Luis Potosí, Mexico this year. Rachel presented the paper “Who’s in and who’s out? A case study of multimodal CLIP-filtering in DataComp”. Check out the details here.

The UW Security Lab enjoyed a whirlwind week at SOUPS and USENIX Security last week, one of our favorite weeks every year!

• MS student Grace Brigham spoke about “Measuring and mitigating harms at the intersections of generative AI and image-based sexual abuse” in the Societal & User-Centered Privacy in AI (SUPA) workshop
• Grace also presented her first-author paper at SOUPS: “‘Violation of my body:’ Perceptions of AI-generated non-consensual (intimate) imagery” (also with collaborators Miranda Wei, Yoshi Kohno, and Elissa Redmiles)
• PhD student Miranda Wei co-organized the Gender, Online Safety, and Sexuality Workshop (GOSS) workshop
• Miranda was also awarded the John Karat Award at SOUPS, already reported here
• Miranda also presented two first-author papers at USENIX Security:
  • “Understanding Help-Seeking and Help-Giving on Social Media for Image-Based Sexual Abuse” (also with collaborators from Google, Sunny Consolvo, Patrick Gage Kelley, Tara Matthews, Sarah Meiklejohn, Renee Shelby, Kurt Thomas, and Rebecca Umbach, as well as UW collaborators Franzi Roesner and Yoshi Kohno)
  • “SoK (or SoLK?): On the Quantitative Study of Sociodemographic Factors and Computer Security Behaviors” (also with collaborators Yael Eiger, Yoshi Kohno, Elissa Redmiles, and Franzi Roesner)
• PhD student Kaiming Cheng presented his first-author paper at USENIX Security: “When the User Is Inside the User Interface: An Empirical Study of UI Security Properties in Augmented Reality” (also with collaborators Arka Bhattacharya, Michelle Lin, Jaewook Lee, Aroosh Kumar, Jeffery Tian, Yoshi Kohno, and Franzi Roesner)