
Kentrell Owens
PhD Student (2020 - present)
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA
[my first name]@cs.washington.edu
[CV under construction]
My pronouns are he/him.
Twitter: @KentrellOwens
About Me
I'm a second year PhD student at the University of Washington in the Security & Privacy Research Lab. My advisors are 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 underserved communities.
I earned my M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) where I worked with Lorrie Cranor, 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
01/20/2022 - Our paper on the risks of electronic monitoring smartphone applications was (conditionally) accepted into USENIX Security 2022! More details to come soon!
06/24/2021 - Our paper from my internship at Duo Security got accepted at SOUPS! Also I recently attended Cornell's Summer School on Designing Technology for Social Impact; I had a great time and met some great people! Lastly, I gave a talk on our CHI 2021 paper at PEPR 2021; I got lots of good questions and feedback from the attendees. Now that I've finished my 1st year here, I'm excited to enjoy the Seattle summer, and hopefully relax a bit.
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.
Publications
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User Perceptions of the Usability and Security of Smartphones as FIDO2 Roaming Authenticators [preprint pdf]
Kentrell Owens, Olabode Anise, Amanda Krauss, Blase Ur
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2021). Online, Aug 2021.
BibTeX -
"You Gotta Watch What You Say": Surveillance of Communication with Incarcerated People. [pdf, html]
Kentrell Owens, Camille Cobb, Lorrie Cranor.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021). Online, May 8–13, 2021.
[One pager for ACJ]
BibTeX
Honorable Mention Award
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A Framework For Evaluating the Usability and Security of Smartphones as FIDO2 Roaming Authenticators
Kentrell Owens, Blase Ur, Olabode Anise.
Proceedings of the Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication 2020 Workshop (WAY 2020). Online, August 2020. -
Studying Passwords to Create Domain-Specific Blocklists (Poster). [Extended abstract]
Kentrell Owens, Mengchen Yong, Neha Sridhar, Ziheng Ni, Joshua Tan, Lorrie Cranor.
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2019). August 2019. -
pico-Boo: How to avoid scaring students away in a CTF competition.
Kentrell Owens, Alexander Fulton, Luke Jones, Martin Carlisle.
Journal of The Colloquium for Information System Security Education (CISSE 2019). June 2019.
Best Student Paper Award
Last updated January 2022.