Simon S. Woo's Home Page

Simon Woo is a Ph.D. candidate at USC/ISI supervised by Prof. Jelena Mirkovic. His current research interests include usable security, privacy protection, cloud computing, network security, and cybersecurity education.

He was a Member of Technical Staff for 9 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, CA. As a technologist, he conducted networking and cybersecurity research and development. He involved in network and protocol simulation for NASA Constellation Program and space time synchronization and QoS services development for NASA Deep Space Network. Prior to joining JPL in 2005, he interned at Entropic Communications in San Diego to evaluate the protocol performance. Also, he worked at Intel Corp.

He earned his B.S. in Electrical Engineering degree from Univ. of Washington, Seattle, M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering degree from Univ. of California, San Diego, specializing in communication theory and systems under the supervision of Laurence B. Milstein, and M.S. in Computer Science degree from USC.

  • Contact Information: myfiStanDLastnAmE aT usc d0t edu
  • Google Scholar
  • CV

    • Simon's reseach and work interests include but are not limited to Usable Security, Cloud computing, and Networking. His current research activities at USC/ISI are : 1) Cybersecurity Curriculum Development (sponsored by Intel Corp), 2) Multiple Public Cloud Resource Allocation, and 3) Usable Security: Novel User Authentication mechanism development.



    "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." - Mark Twain

    Media Coverage

  • ETNews on 3D CAPTCHA, 2016 (in Korean)

    • Recent Publications

    2017

  • Simon S. Woo, "Computer Vision Attacks against 3D CAPTCHAs", The First International Workshop on The Bright and Dark Sides of Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities for Privacy and Security (CV-COPS2017) In conjunction with the IEEE CVPR 2017 , Honolulu, USA, July 2017.

  • Simon S. Woo, Jelena Mirkovic, Ron Artstein, and Elsi Kaiser, "Life-Experience Passwords (LEPs)", Usenix SOUPS 2017 (Invited Poster), Santa Clara, USA, July 2017.

    • 2016

  • Simon S. Woo and Jelena Mirkovic. "Improving Recall and Security of Passphrases Through Use of Mnemonics", Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Passwords (Passwords), Bochum, Germany, 2016 (pdf).

  • Simon S. Woo, Jelena Mirkovic, Elsi Kaiser, and Ron Artstein "Life Experience Passwords (LEPs)", The 32nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Los Angeles, 2016 (Acceptance Rate 22.8%) (pdf)

  • Simon S. Woo, Zuyao Li, and Jelena Mirkovic, "Good Automatic Authentication Question Generation", The 9th SIGGEN International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG), Edinburgh, 2016 (pdf)

  • Simon S. Woo, Jingul Kim, Duoduo Yu, and Beomjun Kim, "Exploration of 3D Texture and Projection for New CAPTCHA Design", The 17th World Conference on Information Security Applications (WISA), Jeju, 2016 (Best Conference Paper) (pdf)

    • 2015

  • Simon S. Woo and Harsha Manjunatha, "Empirical Data Analysis on User Privacy and Sentiment in Personal Blogs", 2nd ACM SIGIR Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Information Retrieval, Chilie, 2015 (pdf)

  • Jelena Mirkovic, Aimee Tabor, Simon S. Woo, and Portia Pusey, "Engaging Novices in Cybersecurity Competitions: A Vision and Lessons Learned at ACM Tapia 2015", 2015 USENIX Summit on Gaming, Games, and Gamification in Security Education (3GSE), D.C, 2015 (pdf)

    • Projects