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Mohammed passed his PhD defense. Some cool studies on emerging authentication paradigms, including those at ACM TOPS’21, EuroS&P’21, ASIACCS’21, and more. He will continue his academic expedition as an Assistant Prof. at Jazan University, Saudi Arabia. Congratulations!

Mohammed is the 10th PhD graduate of the SPIES lab. Who are the next 10? 🙂

Dr. Saxena has a new NSF CICI grant funded:

NSF Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI), “UCSS: Towards Secure and Usable Push Notification Authentication for Collaborative Scientific Infrastructures”, $499,934, Aug 2021 – Aug 2024, Sole PI.

This project will allow us to study and redesign push notification based authentication.

• SoK: Assessing the Threat Potential of Vibration-based Attacks against Live Speech using Mobile Sensors
  Payton Walker and Nitesh Saxena
  In ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), Jun-Jul 2021.
  [pdf]
• Spearphone: A Lightweight Speech Privacy Exploit via Accelerometer-Sensed Reverberations from Smartphone Loudspeakers
  Abhishek Anand, Chen Wang, Jian Liu, Nitesh Saxena and Yingying Chen
  In ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks (WiSec), Jun-Jul 2021.
  [pdf]

Mashari Alatawi passed his PhD qualifiers with a literature review and systematization of end-to-end encryption systems, in particular focusing on the authentication ceremonies deployed by these systems.

Authentication of Voice Commands on Voice Assistance Systems Leveraging Vibrations on Wearables
Cong Shi, Yan Wang, Yingying Chen, and Nitesh Saxena.
In IEEE Security and Privacy (Magazine), Special Issue of Selected Paper from ACSAC’20, 2021.

Shalini Saini passed her PhD qualifiers with a unique survey on the impact of predatory science, in particular, on medical AI solutions.

Dr. Saxena is serving as the PC Co-Chair for the IEEE CNS 2021 conference. This is a top-tier venue for presenting security and privacy research as it pertains to communications and network security. The deadline is May 17, 2021. Please submit your best work.

https://cns2021.ieee-cns.org/

SPIES Lab will have 3 papers presented at ASIACCS 2021.

• EchoVib: Exploring Voice Authentication via Unique Non-Linear Vibrations of Short Replayed Speech
  Abhishek Anand, Jian Liu, Chen Wang, Maliheh Shirvanian, Nitesh Saxena and Yingying Chen
  In ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), June 2021.
• Bypassing Push-based Second Factor and Passwordless Authentication with Human-Indistinguishable Notifications
  Mohammed Jubur, Prakash Shrestha, Nitesh Saxena and Jay Prakash
  In ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), June 2021.
• HVAC: Evading Classifier-based Defenses in Hidden Voice Attacks
  Yi Wu, Xiangyu Xu, Payton Walker, Jian Liu, Nitesh Saxena, Yingying Chen and Jiadi Yu
  In ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS), June 2021.

Two papers accepted to EuroS&P 2021:

• Press @$@$ to Login: Strong Wearable Second Factor Authentication via Short Memorywise Effortless Typing Gestures
  Prakash Shrestha, Nitesh Saxena, Diksha Shukla and Vir Phoha
  In the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), Sep 2021.
• Countering Concurrent Login Attacks in Just Tap Push-based Authentication: A Redesign and Usability Evaluations
  Jay Prakash, Clarice Chua Qing Yu, Tanvi Ravindra Thombre, Andrei Bytes, Mohammed Jubur, Nitesh Saxena, Lucienne Blessing, Jianying Zhou and Tony Quek
  In the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), Sep 2021.