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
[my first name]@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

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.

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.

Publications

Last updated June 2021.