Daniel Zappala
For appointments, see my office hours page.
I lead the Usable Security and Privacy Lab, where our goal is to help people protect their security and privacy online. Our research is human-centered, meaning we collaborate with people to understand and design for their needs.
Some of our current projects include:
Studying how people apply mental models and threat models to understand and reason about new authentication technologies.
Understanding how Passkeys is being rolled out as a new authentication service.
Identifying how usable security and privacy researchers conduct human-centric threat modeling.
Understanding how immigrant generations teach each other online security and privacy practices.
Understanding how teens reason about computer security and privacy.
I have been a professor at Brigham Young University since 2004. Prior to that I was a professor at the University of Oregon. I received my PhD from the University of Southern California in 1997, where I was advised by Dr. Deborah Estrin. I was also very fortunate to work with Lixia Zhang, Scott Shenker, and Bob Braden. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
One of the beautiful things about academia is you can change your research interests over time. I originally started in networking, with a focus on multicast and resource reservations. Over time this led to research in peer-to-peer networking and wireless networks. Later in my career I switched to usable security and privacy. What draws me to this area is the focus on making computing more centered on people and their needs.
I did not start out imagining a career in academia and feel lucky to have found my way here, because I enjoy helping students grow and reach their potential. I highly recommend figuring out life as you live it. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and explore new things.
This is what I love to do in my spare time.
