A portrait of Carson with a red brick wall in the background. He is smiling, because he has not yet experienced the horrors of grad school.
E-mail: carson dot powers at tufts dot edu

I'm a PhD candidate in the Tufts Security & Privacy Lab, where I research human factors affecting security professionals and software developers with Dr. Daniel Votipka. I'm also interested in adversarial thinking (AT) as it pertains to cybersecurity and software development. AT is commonly defined as the ability to think like a hacker, which I believe is the creative thought process necessary for vulnerability discovery and threat modeling. I'm interested in comparing the mental models of novices to those of seasoned professionals to find better ways to teach AT. With a better AT curriculum, we can measure the effect of AT education on threat modeling performance.


I previously worked with Dr. Peter Peterson at the University of Minnesota Duluth Laboratory for Advanced Research in Systems (UMD LARS). While there, I studied adaptive lossless data compression and computer security education, and I supported Dr. Peterson's ongoing research in identifying student misconceptions in computer security (supported by NSF #1821788).


Teaching

CS 11 - Introduction to Computer Science [Instructor, Summer 2024]

CS 114 - Network Security [TA, Spring 2023 and Spring 2025]

Current Work

Open-Source Software Security

Vulnerability Information Resources

Publications

  • Carson Powers, Nickolas Gravel, Micah Sherr, Michelle Mazurek, Daniel Votipka. "'I can say I'm John Travolta...but I'm not John Travolta': Investigating the Impact of Changes to Social Media Verification Policies on User Perceptions of Verified Accounts." Twentieth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, 2024.[PDF]
  • Ronald Thompson, Madeline McLaughlin, Carson Powers, Daniel Votipka. "'There are rabbit holes I want to go down that I'm not allowed to go down': An Investigation of Security Expert Threat Modeling Practices for Medical Devices." USENIX Security, 2024.
  • JH Klemmer, SA Horstmann, N Patnaik, C Ludden, C Burton, C Powers, F Massacci, A Rahman, D Votipka, HR Lipford, A Rashid, A Naiakshina, S Fahl. "Using AI Assistants in Software Development: A Qualitative Study on Security Practices and Concerns." ACM CCS, 2024. [PDF]
  • WiP: Where's Eve? Evaluating Student Threat Modeling Performance and Perceptions. Carson Powers, Nickolas Gravel, Maxwell Mitchell, Daniel Votipka. 8th Workshop on Security Information Workers, 2022. [PDF]