The Human Side of Cybersecurity Seminar Series: Lorrie Cranor and Privacy

Carnegie Mellon University Professor Discusses Security and Privacy for Humans 

Discover where the field is headed and how to apply lessons learned during the past 20 years

Making security easy to use is no small task and will part of the discussion during the second seminar in the CCI Spring 2021 Seminar Series: The Human Side of Cybersecurity.

Traditionally, security and privacy research focused mostly on technical mechanisms and was based on the naive assumptions that Alice and Bob were capable, attentive, and willing to jump through any number of hoops to communicate securely, noted Lorrie Cranor, Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor of the CyLab Security and Privacy Institute and FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. However, 20 years ago that started to change when a seminal paper asked "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt" and called for usability evaluations and usable design strategies for security.

Today a substantial body of interdisciplinary literature exists on usability evaluations and design strategies for both security and privacy. Nonetheless, it is still difficult for most people to encrypt their email, manage their passwords, and configure their social network privacy settings. In this talk, Cranor will highlight some of the lessons learned from the past 20 years of usable privacy and security research, and explore where the field might be headed.

About Lorrie Cranor

Lorrie Faith Cranor is the Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies of CyLab and the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She also directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program.

In 2016 she served as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, working in the office of Chairwoman Ramirez. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company that was acquired by Proofpoint. She has authored over 200 research papers on online privacy, usable security, and other topics. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O'Reilly 2005) and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also co-founded the Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR). She chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002).

Cranor has served on a number of boards and working groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, the Computing Research Association Board of Directors, the Aspen Institute Cybersecurity Group, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In her younger days she was honored as one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. More recently she was elected to the ACM CHI Academy, named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to usable privacy and security research and education, and named an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to privacy engineering. She has also received an Alumni Achievement Award from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, the 2018 ACM CHI Social Impact Award, the 2018 International Association of Privacy Professionals Privacy Leadership Award, and (with colleagues) the 2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University. She holds a doctorate in Engineering and Policy from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2012-13 she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology. She practices yoga, plays soccer, walks to work, and runs after her three children.

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