"Courage is found in unlikely places."-J.R.R. Tolkien

Ashwini Rao is a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Ashwini is a member of the Requirements Engineering Lab, and is fortunate to work with some wonderful students and an awesome advisor, Dr.Travis Breaux. Ashwini is so enamored with academics and industry that she keeps switching between the two. In the process she has acquired significant experience in computer systems and security, completed two masters degrees (MS Computer Security, Carnegie Mellon University; MS Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), finished a bachelors degree (BS Computer Science and Engineering, University of Mysore), and held four full time jobs (Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego, CA; Appian Corporation, Reston, VA among others).

About me

Prefer to listen and observe than talk

Research Interests

Privacy, law, requirements, security

Publications

Papers, presentations, talks

Read more

Recent Events

21 March 2013: Paper on identifying conflicts among privacy requirements in policies, for example, Facebook, Zynga and AOL, accepted to 21st IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) 2013.

4 February 2013: Scientific American 60 second science podcast on password security research

29 January 2013: NPR local station WESA interviewed me about password security work

25 January 2013: More password security research news: CMU Homepage, Ars Technica, Mashable, Livescience and more!

20 January 2013: Password security research in news: ACM TechNews, SlashDot, DailyMail UK, Gizmodo, Geek.com, Twitter and news media in India (Times of India, CNN-IBN, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Deccan Herald)

17 January 2013: Password security research featured on NewScientist!

20 December 2012: Received Graduate Student Assembly/Provost conference funding award of $500 to attend CODASPY 2013 Conference

19 November 2012: Paper on passphrase and password security accepted as short paper in Third ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY) 2013

24 September 2012: Presented our paper at the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Requirements Engineering Patterns (RePa'12) [ PPT ]

Publications

Travis D. Breaux, Ashwini Rao. Formal Analysis of Privacy Requirements Specifications for Multi-Tier Applications. To Appear in 21st IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'13), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2013. [ PAPER ] [ TECH. REPORT ]

Ashwini Rao, Hanan Hibshi, Travis D. Breaux, Jean-Michel Lehker, Jianwei Niu. Less is More? Investigating the Role of Examples in Security Studies using Analogical Transfer (under submission). Mar. 2013

Ashwini Rao, Birendra Jha, Gananand Kini. Effect of Grammar on Security of Long Passwords (short paper). 3rd ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY'13), San Antonio, Texas, Feb. 2013 [ SHORT PAPER ] [ TECH. REPORT ]

Travis D. Breaux, Hanan Hibshi, Ashwini Rao, Jean-Michel Lehker. Towards a Framework for Pattern Experimentation: Understanding empirical validity in requirements engineering patterns. 2nd IEEE Workshop on Requirements Engineering Patterns (RePa'12), Chicago, Illinois, Sep. 2012. [ PAPER ] [ PPT ]

Ashwini Rao, Birendra Jha, Gananand Kini. Effect of Grammar on Security of Long Passwords . Poster presentation, Joint Summer Schools on Cryptography and Principles of Software Security, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, May 30 - June 1, 2012. [ POSTER ]

Ashwini Rao. Compression in Memory Constrained DBMSs. Masters Thesis, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, Jun. 2005. [ PDF ]

Resume and CV

[ Resume ] [ CV ]

Contact

Office: 4123 Wean Hall, Carnegie Mellon University