Kent Seamons

Biography

Dr. Kent Seamons is the Director of the Internet Security Research Lab in the Computer Science Department at BYU. His research interests are in usable security, privacy, authentication, end-to-end encryption, identity management, and trust management. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited over 7,000 times. Dr. Seamons has been awarded over $6 million in funding from NSF, DHS, DARPA, and industry. He is also a co-inventor on four patents in the areas of automated trust negotiation, single sign-on, and security overlays.

His research has recently been funded by NSF, DHS, and Sandia National Labs. He teaches courses in computer security, blockchain technologies, and systems programming. He has supervised 2 Ph.D. dissertations and 40 M.S. theses. He helped advise recent PhD students that won the John Karat Usable Privacy and Security Student Research Award (2017) and the Internet Defense Prize First Runner-Up (2018). Recent papers by his students have been awarded Honorable Mention at CHI 2015 and Best Paper at SecDev 2017.

Dr. Seamons has a B.S. in Computer Science from BYU. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he conducted research in parallel I/O and was a DARPA Fellow. He was awarded the David J. Kuck Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award from the Department of Computer Science at Illinois in 1997. Prior to joining the faculty at BYU, Dr. Seamons conducted research at the IBM Transarc Lab in Pittsburgh, PA where he was a co-inventor of trust negotiation.

Research

• NSF Usable Key Management, 2018
• NSF Middleware for Certificate-Based Authentication, 2015.
• DHS, TrustBase, 2016.
• Google Faculty Research Award, Summer 2014
• Vita
• Google Scholar (h-index=34), DBLP
• Current Collaborations
  
  • Scott Ruoti, University of Tennessee
  • Daniel Zappala, Internet Research Lab, BYU
• Current Projects
  
  • User Preferences for Deniability
  • Key Management
  • Usable Two-Factor Authentication
  • Passwordless Authentication
  • Usable Secure Email
• Past Projects
  
  • TrustBase: Certificate-based Authentication
  • Measuring the Prevalence of TLS Proxies
  • User attitudes regarding TLS inspection

Recent Publications

• J. Reynolds, T. Smith, K. Reese, L. Dickinson, S. Ruoti, and K. Seamons. A Tale of Two Studies: The Best and Worst of YubiKey Usability, 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2018), May 2018.
• T. Monson, J. Reynolds, T. Smith, S. Ruoti, D. Zappala, and K. Seamons. A Usability Study of Secure Email Deletion, European Workshop on Usable Security (EuroUSEC), April 2018.
• E. Vaziripour, R. Farahbakhsh, M. O’Neill, J. Wu, K. Seamons, and D. Zappala, Private But Not Secure: A Survey Of the Privacy Preferences and Practices of Iranian Users of Telegram, Workshop on Usable Security (USEC), February 2018.
• S. Ruoti, K. Seamons. End-to-End Passwords, New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW 2017), Islamorada, Florida, October 2017.
• S. Ruoti, K. Seamons, D. Zappala. Layering Security at Global Control Points to Secure Unmodified Software, IEEE Secure Development Conference (IEEE SecDev 2017), Boston, Massachusetts, September 2017. Best Paper Award.
• M. O’Neill, S. Heidbrink, S. Ruoti, J. Whitehead, D. Bunker, L. Dickinson, T. Hendershot, J. Reynolds, K. Seamons, D. Zappala. TrustBase: An Architecture to Repair and Strengthen Certificate-Based Authentication, 27th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2017.
• E. Vaziripour, R. Clinton, J. Wu, M. O’Neill, J. Whitehead, S. Heidbrink, K. Seamons, and D. Zappala. Is that you, Alice? A Usability Study of the Authentication Ceremony of Secure Messaging Applications, 13th Annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2017), Santa Clara, California, July 2017.
• S. Ruoti, T. Monson, J. Wu, D. Zappala, K. Seamons. Weighing Context and Trade-offs: How Suburban Adults Selected Their Online Security Posture, 13th Annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2017), Santa Clara, California, July 2017.
• M. O’Neill, S. Ruoti, K. Seamons, D. Zappala. TLS Inspection: How Often and Who Cares? IEEE Internet Computing, May/June 2017.
• M. O’Neill, S. Ruoti, K. Seamons, D. Zappala. TLS Proxies: Friend or Foe?, ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2016). ACM, 2016.
• S. Ruoti, J. Andersen, T. Hendershot, D. Zappala, K. Seamons. Private Webmail 2.0: Simple and Easy-to-Use Secure Email, 29th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2016). ACM, 2016.
• A. Afanasyev, J. Halderman, S. Ruoti, K. Seamons, Y. Yu, D. Zappala, L. Zhang. Content-based Security for the Web, New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW 2016). ACM, 2016.
• S. Ruoti, M. O’Neill, D. Zappala, K. Seamons. User Attitudes Toward the Inspection of Encrypted Traffic, 12th Annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2016), Denver, Colorado, June 2016. [Presentation]
• S. Ruoti, J. Andersen, K. Seamons. Strengthening Passwords-based Authentication, 2nd Workshop on “Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication” at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (WAY 2016). Denver, Colorado, 2016. [Presentation]
• S. Ruoti, K. Seamons. Standard Metrics and Scenarios for Usable Authentication, 2nd Workshop on “Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication” at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (WAY 2016). Denver, Colorado, 2016. [Presentation]
• E. Vaziripour, M. O’Neill, J. Wu, S. Heidbrink, K. Seamons, and D. Zappala. Social Authentication for End-to-End Encryption, 2nd Workshop on “Who Are You?! Adventures in Authentication” at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (WAY 2016). USENIX, 2016. [Presentation]
• Ruoti, J. Andersen, S. Heidbrink, M. O’Neill, E. Vaziripour, J. Wu, D. Zappala, K. Seamons. “We’re on the Same Page”: A Usability Study of Secure Email Using Pairs of Novice Users, 34th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016), San Jose, California, May 2016. Honorable Mention Award.
• S. Ruoti, B. Roberts, K. Seamons. Authentication Melee: A Usability Analysis of Seven Web Authentication Systems 24th Annual International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW 2015), Florence, Italy, May 2015.
• M. O’Neill, S. Ruoti, K. Seamons, D. Zappala. Poster – TLS Proxies: Friend or Foe? 2014 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2014), Scottsdale, Arizona, November 2014.
• S. Ruoti, N. Kim, B. Burgon, T.W. van der Horst, and K. Seamons. Confused Johnny: When Automatic Encryption Leads to Confusion and Mistakes 9th Annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2013), Newcastle, United Kingdom, July 2013. [Presentation]

Advice to Students

• I am looking for undergraduate, MS, and PhD students to conduct research into usable security and end-to-end encryption. Please send me your resume and a cover letter with your interests and availability.
• How to Choose a Research Topic. Panel presentation at Sandia National Labs TITANS, 2013 with additions from Gene Spafford.

Current Courses

• CS 401R - Topics in Computer Science (Winter 2022)
• CS 324 - Systems Programming (Fall 2022)
• CS 401R - Topics in Computer Science (Winter 2023)
• CS 665 - Advanced Computer Security (Winter 2023)
• CS 401R - Topics in Computer Science (Fall 2023)
• CS 665 - Advanced Computer Security (Fall 2023)