EFF is proud to announce a new addition to our crack advisory board: security expert and scholar Tadayoshi Kohno. A professor at University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Kohno is a researcher whose work focuses on identifying and fixing security flaws in emerging technologies, the Internet, and the cloud.

Kohno examines and tests software and networks with the goal of developing solutions to security and privacy risks before those risks become a threat. His research focuses on helping protect the security, privacy, and safety of users of current and future generation technologies.

Kohno has revealed security flaws in electronic voting machines, implantable cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers, and automobiles. He recently studied flaws in augmented reality (AR) apps, and last year co-developed a tool for developers to build secure multi-user AR platforms. A 2019 report he co-authored about the genealogy site GEDmatch, used to find the Golden State Killer, showed vulnerabilities to multiple security risks that could allow bad actors to create fake genetic profiles and falsely appear as a relative to people in the GEDmatch database.

Kohno has spent the last 20 years working to raise awareness about computer security among students, industry leaders, and policy makers. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and a Technology Review TR-35 Young Innovator Award. He has presented his research to the U.S. House of Representatives, and had his research profiled in the NOVA ScienceNOW “Can Science Stop Crime?” documentary and the NOVA “CyberWar Threat” documentary. Kohno received his Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego, where he earned the department’s Doctoral Dissertation Award.

We’re thrilled that Kohno has joined EFF’s advisory board.