Picture of Kentrell Owens, a handsome young man, presenting a poster at a conference

Kentrell Owens

PhD Student (2020 - present)

Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA
kentrell@cs.washington.edu
[CV under construction]

My pronouns are he/him.
Twitter: @KentrellOwens

About Me

I'm a first year PhD student at the University of Washington in the Security & Privacy Research Lab. I'm fortunate to have two wonderful advisors: Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno. My research area is computer security and privacy. My research interests include usable security and privacy, mobile/IoT security and privacy, and web security and privacy. I'm specifically interested in the computer security and privacy needs of marginalized communities.

I earned my M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), and my B.S. from Rice University (Houston, TX). I grew up in rural northern Louisiana, and I'm a first-generation college student. I owe the victories in my life to all the investments my friends, family, teachers, and communities have made in me. If you're reading this, you might be one of those people; thank you!

Updates

01/24/2021 - Some work I submitted from my time at CMU ("You Gotta Watch What You Say": Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated People) got accepted to CHI 2021! I'll share the pre-print here soon.

07/08/2020 - Good news; a workshop paper I worked on with Olabode Anise and Blase Ur ("A Framework for Evaluating the Usability and Security of Smartphones as FIDO2 Roaming Authenticators") just got accepted to Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication Workshop (WAY) 2020. We got a lot of great feedback from the reviewers, so I'm looking forward to great discussions there.

04/18/2020 - I'm excited to announce that I'm starting a PhD in computer science this fall at the University of Washington, working in the Security & Privacy Research Lab with Franziska Roesner and Tadayoshi Kohno. Thank to the dozens of people who listened to me, answered my questions, and helped me through this application process.

Publications

Last updated January 2021.