SPLICE

PI Landau: How to Talk so Policymakers Will Listen

tinapavlovich — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:22:00 +0000

Are you an academic interested in broadening the impacts of your research to effect changes in policy? Dr. Susan Landau started her career as a theoretical computer scientist working on algebraic algorithms and has spent the last twenty-five years in cybersecurity policy. She recently gave a keynote talk at the 29th International Workshop on Security Protocols on the key elements of effectively communicating technical issues to policymakers.

Landau’s fourteen lessons are summarized below. Read the full keynote text here to learn more!

Policymakers are smart.
Facts are 10% of the equation.
Speak so policymakers understand.
Give examples that are meaningful to your audience.
Analogies make a big difference.
Focus on what resonates.
Tailor your information to the arguments that most resonate with the policymaker.
Provide alternatives.
The EU is not the United States.
There is no “the government.”
Dancing with NGOs can be very valuable. But never forget they have their own agendas.
If you want your policy ideas accepted, ignore who gets the credit.
Want to get to know the press? People in civil- liberties organizations? Broaden the set of meetings you attend.
How do you get involved?

SPLICE Research Featured in IEEE Spectrum

tinapavlovich — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:48:00 +0000

SPLICE team members at City College and Johns Hopkins are leading research efforts on resilient mesh networks. Their work is motivated by connectivity blackouts in recent protests around the world.

Read the IEEE Spectrum news article here. You can find the codebase for this work and read more from the research team here.

Sarah Radway, Cora Ruiz, Tushar Jois, and David Inyangson (from left to right) presenting their work in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo courtesy of Cora Ruiz, David Inyangson, and Sarah Radway

New SPLICE Publication on Secure Group Mesh Messaging

tinapavlovich — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:37:14 +0000

Amigo is a mesh messaging system for protesters that combines a tailored CGKA with a new clique-based routing protocol. It employs end-to-end encryption of authenticated messages, ensures that an attacker cannot break the confidentiality of messages sent before their attack, and provides post-compromise security means where an attacker cannot break the confidentiality of messages sent after their attack. Thus, Amigo achieves secure group mesh messaging in the large-scale protest setting.

To learn more, read the paper. To receive notification of SPLICE news, subscribe to this blog!

Inyangson, David, Sarah Radway, Tushar M. Jois, Nelly Fazio, and James Mickens. “Amigo: Secure Group Mesh Messaging in Realistic Protest Settings.” Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, November 19, 2025, 4244–58. https://doi.org/10.1145/3719027.3765133.

SPLICE Publication: A Trigger for the Autonomous Decommissioning of Smart Devices

tinapavlovich — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:35:02 +0000

When smart-home devices reach the end of their useful life and are sold or discarded, the security and privacy implications become significant if the devices are not cleansed of sensitive information. A discarded security camera, for example, might use non-volatile memory to store the passwords to both a home’s Wi-Fi network and to a cloud-based server that stores the images captured by the camera. If an adversary recovers these credentials from a discarded device, the adversary would gain access to the home and the cloud.

Our solution provides a mechanism for a device to autonomously detect conditions that require decommissioning and to automatically initiate that process. In short, devices running our protocol will discover when they are no longer ‘at home’, and trigger an internal function to erase any sensitive data and credentials.

Ravindra Mangar et al., “A Trigger for the Autonomous Decommissioning of Smart Devices,” Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Internet of Things, ACM, November 18, 2025, 174–82, https://doi.org/10.1145/3770501.3770522.

SPLICE Publication on Smart Devices in Rental Properties

tinapavlovich — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:26:00 +0000

The increased use of smart-home devices in short-term rental properties raises privacy concerns that range from interpersonal entities’ monitoring and surveillance, to people’s data being collected, stored, and shared with institutional entities. In this paper, we focus on investigating the perspectives of short-term rental hosts’ and whether they try to reach a consensus regarding data collection practices privacy with guests.

This paper highlights hosts’ conflicting needs in protecting their short-term rentals versus protecting guests’ privacy. We describe hosts’ limited actions to ease guests’ privacy concerns, and we provide recommendations to improve platforms’ policies, guidelines, and design features to facilitate privacy negotiation between hosts and guests.

Read the paper to learn more about our methods, findings, and recommendations.

Park, Sunyup, Weijia He, Elmira Deldari, Pardis Emami-Naeini, Danny Yuxing Huang, Jessica Vitak, Yaxing Yao, and Michael Zimmer. “Well-Intended but Half-Hearted: Hosts’ Consideration of Guests’ Privacy Using Smart Devices on Rental Properties.” In Twentieth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. Philadelphia, PA: USENIX, 2024. https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2024/presentation/park.

SPLICE Publication on Protocol Reverse Engineering Automation

tinapavlovich — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 10:32:00 +0000

Protocol reverse engineering is the process of uncovering a formal specification for a network protocol from analyzing individual network packets. It is crucial to system security as it enables the identification of vulnerabilities and the creation of more robust defenses.

While protocol reverse engineers perform this work manually, automation could enable them to perform this task faster and with greater precision. This paper explores the needs of protocol reverse engineers and how automation / AI systems can best address those needs.

Read the paper to learn more about our recommendations and insights!

Katcher, Samantha, James Mattei, Jared Chandler, and Daniel Votipka. “An Investigation of Interaction and Information Needs for Protocol Reverse Engineering Automation.” In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–21. Yokohama Japan: ACM, 2025. Accessed June 6, 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713630.

New Patent: Intrusion Detection System for IoT Platforms

tinapavlovich — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 10:50:00 +0000

SPLICE team members from Morgan State University were recently issued a patent (US 12,399,994 B2) for their work on an intrusion detection system for IoT platforms. Their invention provides a scalable and efficient framework to classify cyber-physical attacks on IoT devices with various storage and processing capabilities.

A novel packet-capture parsing tool was developed to extract meaningful patterns from captures of raw data packets. Additionally, an ensemble machine-learning based intrusion detection system was built as a countermeasure to minimize the threat surfaces between the IoT cloud platform and edge devices.

Those interested in this work are encouraged to contact the inventors. Interested in learning about other SPLICE research? Check out our Zotero page for a full list of SPLICE publications.

Kornegay, Kevin, and Otily Toutsop. Ensemble Intrusion Detection System for IOT Platforms. US12399994B2, 26 Aug. 2025, https://patents.google.com/patent/US12399994B2/en?oq=US+12%2c399%2c994+B2.

Featured: PI Susan Landau on NPR’s Marketplace

tinapavlovich — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 13:39:52 +0000

In a recent NPR Marketplace story, PI Landau helps put into perspective current American efforts to keep TikTok available in the US. Landau shares a slice of the variably successful history of American efforts to control cryptographic technologies.

To keep up to date on SPLICE news, subscribe to the blog!

Featured: SPLICE Research on Harmonic Radar

tinapavlovich — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:15:49 +0000

SPLICE team members at Dartmouth College and a researcher from the American University of Kuwait collaborated this summer to advance SPLICE research on electronic device detection.

Read the Dartmouth news article here!

Dr. Ali Bostani (left) with Dartmouth PhD student César Argüello Martínez (right). Photo courtesy of Kerry Laufer.

New Publication: Single ANtenna Device for Detecting User’s Natural Eating Habits

tinapavlovich — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:18:52 +0000

Low-cost, single-antenna IoT devices with CSI measuring capabilities, are pervasive in today’s society. We show that it is possible to use inexpensive single-antenna Wi-Fi devices to monitor human eating habits.

SandDune is an infrastructure-based system that continuously monitors CSI information to detect the eating activity occurring in its vicinity. When it detects an eating activity, it scrutinizes the signals further to identify all hand-to-mouth eating gestures in the eating episode. A SandDune-like system can enable low cost, unobtrusive eating activity detection and monitoring with potential uses in health and well-being applications.

Read the paper to learn more about the design of the system and its efficacy!

Jain, Shreyans, et al. “SandDune: Single ANtenna Device for Detecting User’s Natural Eating Habits.” 2025 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and Other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops), 2025, pp. 689–92, https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComWorkshops65533.2025.00164.