SPDR Lab

The Security Privacy &
Democracy Research Laboratory

About

The Security Privacy and Democracy Research (SPDR) Laboratory is an interdisciplinary research group based out of Georgia Tech's College of Computing. We build, break, and measure systems to fight for the future of democracy.

Team

  1. Photo of Dr. Specter

    Michael A. Specter

    Professor & Lab Director

  • Photo of Grace Abuhamad

    Grace Abuhamad

    Senior Research Scientist

  • Photo of Harry Oppenheimer

    Harry Oppenheimer

    Professor, Public Policy

  • Photo of Delaney Gomen

    Delaney Gomen

    PhD Student

  • Photo of George Hosono

    George Ari Hosono

    PhD Student

  • Photo of Shreyas Minocha

    Shreyas Minocha

    PhD Student

  • Photo of Akshaya Kumar

    Akshaya Kumar

    PhD Student

  • Photo of Jenny Blessing

    Jenny Blessing

    Alumna, Ph.D. University of Cambridge

News

  1. Shreyas's work on Age Verification has been accepted to IEEE S&P! You can read about it at Ars Technica!

  2. Delaney Gomen and Prof. Specter discussed their work on election integrity on Caltech's Election Science Office Hours Podcast!

  3. Our security and privacy analysis of Tile has been accepted to Usenix Security `26, and reported on in Wired!

  4. Published an open dataset of FTC Privacy actions, and the FTC's reliance on independent security research.

Publications

  1. Papers, Please: A First Look at Age Verification on the Web
    1. Shreyas Minocha
    2. Isaac Sheridan
    3. Harry Oppenheimer
    4. Paul Pearce
    5. Michael A. Specter

    2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

    [online]

  2. Security and Privacy Analysis of Tile's Location Tracking Protocol
    1. Akshaya Kumar
    2. Anna Raymaker
    3. Michael Specter

    35th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 26)

    [online]

  3. Fingerprinting SDKs for Mobile Apps and Where to Find Them: Understanding the Market for Device Fingerprinting
    1. Michael A. Specter
    2. Mihai Christodorescu
    3. Abbie Farr
    4. Bo Ma
    5. Robin Lassonde

    Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS `25)

    [online]

  4. Cryptography in the Wild: An Empirical Analysis of Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Libraries
    1. Jenny Blessing
    2. Michael A. Specter
    3. Daniel J. Weitzner

    Proceedings of the 19th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security

  5. Robust, Privacy-Preserving, Transparent, and Auditable On-Device Blocklisting
    1. Kurt Thomas
    2. Sarah Meiklejohn
    3. Michael A. Specter
    4. Xiang Wang
    5. Xavier Llorà
    6. Stephan Somogyi
    7. David Kleidermacher

    [online]

  6. A systematization of voter registration security
    1. Jack Cable
    2. Andrés Fábrega
    3. Sunoo Park
    4. Michael A. Specter

    Journal of Cybersecurity

    [online] | 10.1093/cybsec/tyad008

  7. The Android Platform Security Model (2023)
    1. René Mayrhofer
    2. Jeffrey Vander Stoep
    3. Chad Brubaker
    4. Dianne Hackborn
    5. Bram Bonné
    6. Güliz Seray Tuncay
    7. Roger Piqueras Jover
    8. Michael A. Specter

    [online]

  8. Going from bad to worse: from Internet voting to blockchain voting
    1. Sunoo Park
    2. Michael A. Specter
    3. Neha Narula
    4. Ronald L Rivest

    Oxford Journal of Cybersecurity

    [online] | 10.1093/cybsec/tyaa025

  9. KeyForge: Mitigating Email Breaches with Forward- Forgeable Signatures
    1. Michael A. Specter
    2. Sunoo Park
    3. Matthew Green

    30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21)

    [online]

  10. Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System
    1. Michael A. Specter
    2. J. Alex Halderman

    30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 21)

  11. The PACT Protocol Specification
    1. Ronald L. Rivest
    2. Jon Callas
    3. Ran Canetti
    4. Kevin Esvelt
    5. Daniel Kahn Gillmor
    6. Yael Tauman Kalai
    7. Anna Lysyanskaya
    8. Adam Norige
    9. Ramesh Raskar
    10. Adi Shamir
    11. Israel Shen
    12. Michael A. Specter
    13. Vanessa Teague
    14. Ari Trachtenberg
    15. Mayank Varia
    16. Marc Viera
    17. Daniel Weitzner
    18. John Wilkinson
    19. Marc Zissman

  12. The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in US Federal Elections
    1. Michael A. Specter
    2. James Koppel
    3. Daniel Weitnzer

    29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20)

    [online]

  13. Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning
    1. Leilani H. Gilpin
    2. David Bau
    3. Ben Z. Yuan
    4. Ayesha Bajwa
    5. Michael A. Specter
    6. Lalana Kagal

    2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on data science and advanced analytics (DSAA)

  14. Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications
    1. Harold Abelson
    2. Ross Anderson
    3. Steven M. Bellovin
    4. Josh Benaloh
    5. Matt Blaze
    6. Whitfield Diffie
    7. John Gilmore
    8. Matthew Green
    9. Susan Landau
    10. Peter G. Neumann
    11. Ronald L. Rivest
    12. Jeffrey I Schiller
    13. Bruce Schneier
    14. Michael A. Specter
    15. Daniel J. Weitzner

    Journal of Cybersecurity

  15. Security Analysis of Wearable Fitness Devices (Fitbit)
    1. Britt Cyr
    2. Webb Horn
    3. Daniela Miao
    4. Michael A. Specter

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology