HotSoft

Graduations:

• Nick Wright, MA
• Elizabeth Stobert, MA

Research Network Events:

• ISSNet 2011 Workshop, Toronto
• SurfNet 2011 Workshop, Calgary
• ISSNet 2012 Summer School, Vancouver

Conferences

• SOUPS 2011, Seattle

Join us for a one-day workshop on user authentication:
We are organizing a workshop on user authentication, co-located with Financial Cryptography 2011 in St. Lucia on March 4, 2011. The workshop will consist of invited talks and expert panels. A preliminary program is available and will be updated as details are finalized.

Workshop on The Future of User Authentication and Authorization on the Web:
Challenges in Current Practice, New Threats, and Research Directions

Friday, March 4, 2011 — St. Lucia

After completing his comprehensive examinations, Alain spent the past 3 months as an intern at Microsoft Research. He worked with fellow intern and Ph.D. Candidate Kami Vaniea and mentors Stuart Schechter and Rob Reeder on Laissez-faire file sharing.

It has been a fantastic learning experience on several topics, including the subtle issues involved in designing usable access control, how industry-based research at Microsoft differs from academic research, and sneak peeks of upcoming Windows products, such as Windows Phone 7 and Kinect; a controller-less interface for the Xbox 360.

IEEE’s Privacy, Security, Trust conference (PST) was held here in Ottawa this year. The talks were an interesting mix ranging from very technical to public policy topics, including a keynote by Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Dan, Alain, and Robert presented a paper on using eye-gaze as a tool to predict likely click-based graphical password click-points. Sonia taught a half-day tutorial introducing usable security and how to run usability evaluations.

After SOUPS, we went directly to Vancouver for the 2nd annual ISSNet Summer School held at UBC. We had a week of tutorials on different security topics: Virtual Machine Monitors (VMM), Smart Phone Security, and Web Security. The academic work was combined with plenty of opportunity to get to know the other members of ISSNet. Our UBC hosts were great, and organized several of social events around the technical program.

SOUPS and USER were hosted at Microsoft in Redmond, WA this week. It’s always nice to see everyone again and meet new people working in usable security. Listening to the SOUPS talks showed that the community of people engaged in trying to balance or increase both usability and security is growing every year. Our workshop went well, we were lucky to have a wide range of talks and great experts for the panel.  Alain presented a poster about our recent CHI paper, and Sonia presented one about our MVP framework for running authentication studies. Some of the non-academic highlights were the fake lawn on the Microsoft campus and the boat cruise around Seattle.

Each summer, Carleton hosts a group of high school students for Shad Valley’s summer enrichment program in sciences, engineering, technology and entrepreneurship. We held a half-day workshop in our lab for some of the students interested in HCI. Students imagined new applications as they learned about multitouch tabletop technologies, pretended to be attackers as they learned about usable security, and thought of new authentication mechanisms as they tried out the haptic input device.

The NSERC Internetworked Systems Security Network (ISSNet) annual workshop was held in Ottawa last week. Several members of our lab presented posters at the opening reception and poster session. Robert introduced theme 3 (human-oriented security), and talked about our lab’s research. Max, Alain and Elizabeth gave short talks about ongoing research. The workshop was a great opportunity to hear about research and network with other ISSNet researchers and students.

Last week several members of our lab were in Atlanta for CHI 2010.  It was a great conference as usual, with nearly 2400 attendees, lots of fun demos, and interesting talks.  Elizabeth earned 3rd place in the undergraduate Student Research Competition. Alain’s talk and poster presentations went very well too.