Sam King
Friday, Sep 28, 2018 at 11:30 AM in 380 Soda Hall
Title: Stopping fraudsters by changing products
Abstract: Lyft’s whole app experience is geared towards getting new users from the App Store or the Play Store to their first ride as quickly as possible. This streamlined process is great for users, but presents an ever-present problem — how do we prevent bad actors from abusing the lightweight onboarding process? In this talk, I will discuss how the best way to protect accounts is by changing products. I'll describe the systems and techniques we used at Twitter and at Lyft to secure their user's accounts, and I'll extract out general principles on how one should go about changing products to improve security. I will also discuss my research lab's recent work on preventing card-not-present credit card fraud.
Bio: Sam was a professor for eight years at University Illinois Urbana-Champaign; however, five years ago he left his tenured position at UIUC to push himself intellectually and professionally in industry. During these years, he started a company, sold his company to Twitter, worked as a code committing software engineer, fought fake accounts, managed a small team, managed a big team, secured Lyft’s phone-based accounts, battled fraudsters, and led a massive nine month project (which is an eternity in industry) that ended up being the largest growth initiative in the history of Twitter. Now he's back in academia in the CS Department at UC Davis. He plans to continue to research topics in the computer security area, and is especially interested in building systems for fighting fraud and rethinking our notion of digital identity. Sam received his PhD from University of Michigan, his Masters from Stanford, and his Bachelor’s degree from UCLA.