E-mail: carson dot powers at tufts dot edu
I'm a PhD candidate working in the Teaspoon lab at Tufts University, 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. Details to follow on a project I'm cooking up!
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).
TA
Current Work
Vulnerability Information Resources
Incident Response
Publications
- 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]
- WiP: Where's Eve? Evaluating Student Threat Modeling Performance and Perceptions. Carson Powers, Nickolas Gravel, Maxwell Mitchell, Daniel Votipka. SOUPS Poster 2022.