Jackson West

Voltkey is a project started by one of my advisors Dr. Klingensmith. He had the idea of creating a physical password for easy home network configuration. My role in this project is developing the cryptographic mechanism for key agreement. We centered around a Reed-Solomon based algorithm which, with our research, is able to be tunable for any house.

My first project at UW-Madison examined the potiental privacy violations of Video Conferencing Applications (VCAs). In this work, we examined several VCAs and studied how they delt with microphone access. We found that privacy standards towards microphone accesses are weak. In fact, we were able to show that one application (Cisco's Webex) accidently broke their own privacy policy and captured private user activities while the user was muted. After exposing their mistake, Cisco fixed their bug and gave a public statement.

Moonshine was my Master's Thesis project. The idea was to improve randomness for any arbitrary bit stream. We were able to accomplish this by utilizing the equipartition property and ignoring some bits. The novelty was our algorithm as ignoring bits actually improved the distribution of the data sets we analyized.