This site serves as the personal page of Kevin Gallagher, an Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
Email me at k.gallagher [at] fct.unl.pt!
This page serves as a repository of my current projects.
Messengers such as Signal, Element, etc., offer privacy to individuals who wish to communicate. However, do these privacy gains come with usability and UX drawbacks? In this project we study different aspects of the usable security and UX of different secure messengers.
Researching Element UX questions.
(For Reddit verification, the student’s Reddit handle is Lonely_Actuator4029.)
Cybersecurity has its origin in military, which typically exhibits a very hierarchical structre. But what would cybersecurity look like in a democractic, horizontal entity? How do actvist groups, worker cooperatives, and other horizontal groups design security? What technology could we create to facilitate horizontal security policy creation, implementation, and enforcement?
COLBAC: Shifting Cybersecurity From Hierarchical to Horizontal Designs was published in NSPW 2021.
The Tor Browser is the currently the best low-latency anonymity solution on the Internet. However, users of the Tor Browser often come across issues. What isuses do users face when using Tor? Why do users use Tor? How do they understand what Tor is providing them? What can developers do better to provide a better experience on their site for Tor Browser users?
Submitted Scanning the Web for Tor Friendliness to PETS 2023. Resubmission in the next cycle.
People Search Websites aggregate and publicize users’ Personal Identifiable Information (PII), previously sourced from data brokers and make it available to customers who wish to access that information. In this project we study how people can interact with People Search Websites, how effective data removal from these People Search Websites are, and dark patterns in the operation of these sites.
``It Feels Like Whack-a-mole’’: User Experiences of Data Removal from People Search Websites was published in PETS 2022.