Mazurek’s Research Team Receives Two Distinguished Paper Awards at the 29th USENIX Security Symposium

Associate Professor Michelle Mazurek’s research group won two distinguished paper awards at the 2020 USENIX Security Symposium.

USENIX Security provides a platform where researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others can share and explore the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks.

The papers were among 11 selected as distinguished papers out of the 157 presented.

The two awarded papers are : 

1. A Comprehensive Quality Evaluation of Security and Privacy Advice on the Web (Elissa M. Redmiles, Noel Warford, Amritha Jayanti, and Aravind Koneru, University of Maryland; Sean Kross, University of California, San Diego; Miraida Morales, Rutgers University; Rock Stevens and Michelle L. Mazurek, University of Maryland)

The work evaluates the quality of security and privacy advice on the web, based on whether it is comprehensible, actionable and effective.

2.  Understanding security mistakes developers make: Qualitative analysis from Build It, Break It, Fix It (Daniel Votipka, Kelsey R. Fulton, James Parker, Matthew Hou, Michelle L. Mazurek, and Michael Hicks) 

The research categorizes and analyzes different kinds of mistakes and misunderstandings that lead to vulnerabilities in software, based on data from a secure programming contest co-developed and administered with fellow UMD CS Professor, Michael Hicks, who co-led the research presented in the paper

“I am so proud of these papers, and all the hard work and thoughtful research that went into them, especially on the part of the student authors,” said Mazurek. “We appreciate receiving this recognition from the USENIX Security community.”

Mazurek’s research team (the Security, Privacy, People lab, or SP2), focuses on interdisciplinary research in Human Computer Interaction and Security. Mazurek and her team are also associated with the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL).

The Symposium was adapted to be an online event this year because of the global pandemic.