Güliz Tuncay

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PhD

Güliz Seray Tuncay obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019. She received her M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in 2013 and her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, graduating top of her class in 2010. In 2018, she received a distinguished paper award for her work on Android permissions at the prestigious Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium. She is soon joining the Android Security team at Google as the Android Security Princess.

Research Abstract:

At a high level, Güliz’s research aims to make mobile operating systems more secure. To this end, she focuses on ensuring that the necessary access control mechanisms are in place and working effectively and efficiently to protect access to sensitive user data and platform resources. More specifically, she introduced new access control mechanisms to secure interactions of web domains with mobile applications. In addition, she identified critical design issues in Android’s permission system that enabled serious privilege escalation attacks and she proposed alternative designs to this permission model to systematically address the issues. The issues she identified were acknowledged by Google as serious security vulnerabilities and her research consequently influenced the design and implementation of the Android operating system, prompting changes in the official Android releases.