Alumna-Turned-Internet Security Expert Listed Among Nation’s Top Young Innovators
Friday, September 22nd, 2017Adrienne Porter Felt (SRG BSCS 2008) was selected as one of Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.
UVA Today has an article:Alumna-Turned-Internet Security Expert Listed Among Nation’s Top Young Innovators, UVA Today, 21 September 2017.
Felt started working in security when she was a second-year engineering student, responding to a request from computer science professor David Evans, who taught the “Program and Data Representation” course. Evans said Felt stood out amongst her peers because of her “well-thought-out answers and meticulous diagrams.”
“For the summer after her second year, she joined a project one of my Ph.D. students was working on to use the disk drive controller to detect malware based on the reads and writes it makes that are visible to the disk,” Evans said. “She did great work on that project, and by the end of the summer was envisioning her own research ideas.
“She came up with the idea of looking at privacy issues in Facebook applications, which, back in 2007, was just emerging, and no one else was yet looking into privacy issues like this.”
Taking Evans’ offer for a research project was a turning point in Felt’s life, showing her something she liked that she could do well.
“It turned out that I really loved it,” she said. “I like working in privacy and security because I enjoy helping people control their digital experiences. I think of it as, ‘I’m professionally paranoid, so that other people don’t need to be.’”
In her final semester as an undergraduate student at UVA, Felt taught a student-led class on web browsers.
“Her work at Google has dramatically changed the way web browsers convey security information to users, making the web safer for everyone,” Evans said. “Her team at Google has been studying deployment of HTTPS, the protocol that allows web clients to securely communicate with servers, and has had fantastic success in improving security of websites worldwide, as well as a carefully designed plan to use browser interfaces to further encourage adoption of secure web protocols.