Empowering Users Facing Insurmountable Odds

Also on Zoom- https://umd.zoom.us/j/97012302837?pwd=aHZldjgySnF1S29vcTRuZ3pZaUFjUT09 Although the Internet was designed to be decentralized, in reality there are a handful of centralized parties whose unilateral decisions affect the security and privacy of billions of users around the world. In this talk, I will describe some of our efforts to empirically these centralized decision-makers, and systems we have built and deployed that empower users to exert control over their security and privacy. I will talk about this through broad pieces of work in particular: understanding with whom we are communicating online, and evading nation-state censorship. This work is the culmination of collaborations with my PhD students and dozens of undergraduate students; I will briefly discuss our efforts to scale-up undergraduate research.