Julie Thorpe

Associate Professor

Biography

I am an associate professor in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology (FBIT) at Ontario Tech University. I am a member of the Graduate Faculty for both FBIT and the Department of Computer Science. My research is in the area of human factors and computer security, with a focus on user authentication.

Research Interests

Authentication, Software Security, Human Factors, Usability, Passwords, Biometrics, Operating System Security, Security Policy, Brain Computer Interfaces

News

The Security AI Networks Lab
Thursday, Jan 23, 2020
Ying Zhu, Amirali Abari, and I founded the Security, Artificial Intelligence, and Networks Lab (SAIN Lab) in 2017. The SAIN Lab performs applied, multidisciplinary, and …

Multiple M.Sc. and Ph.D. openings
Thursday, Jan 16, 2020

To appear in NSPW 2019
Monday, Sep 23, 2019

All News

Research Group

Current

Samira Zibaei (PhD)
Samine Hosseini (PhD)
Alireza Namanloo (MSc, co-supervised)
Tony Wang (MSc, co-supervised)
Ben Mercier (Undergraduate, co-supervised)
Dinah rinoa Malapaya (Undergraduate, co-supervised)

Past

Zeinab Joudaki (PhD, co-supervised)
Connor Cushing (MSc, co-supervised)
Alaadin Addas (MSc)
Brent MacRae (MSc, co-supervised)
Christopher Bonk (MSc)
Rafael Veras Guimarães (MSc, co-supervised)
Ricardo Rodriguez Garcia (MSc, co-supervised)
Mohammad Jahan (MITS)
Ruba Al-Omari (MITS)
Riaz Khalil (MITS)
Muath Al-Badawi (MITS)
Sajeeva Salgadoe (MITS)
Michael Damanka (MITS)
Cate Dillon (MITS)
Faisal Khan (MITS)
Andre Harricharran (MITS)
Mike Kanagaratnam (MITS)
Destiny Ewansiha (MITS, co-supervised)
Mihai Chiriac (MITS, co-supervised)
Thomas Griffiths (MITS, co-supervised)
Carmel Ganza (Undergraduate)
Kalev Gonvick (Undergradate, co-supervised)
Zachary Parish (Undergraduate, co-supervised)
Elena Kim (Undergraduate)
Joshua Harrington (Undergraduate)
Cathy Sun (Undergraduate)
Ahmed Dauda (Undergraduate)
Brent MacRae (Undergraduate)
Chris Bonk (Undergraduate)
Kee Song Yeoh (Undergraduate)
Sainath Prajapati (Undergraduate)
Robert Burden (Undergraduate)
Zahid Dhanani (Undergraduate)
Jeff Hickson (Undergraduate, co-supervised)

Publications

Rafael Veras, Christopher Collins, Julie Thorpe. A Large-Scale Analysis of the Semantic Password Model and Linguistic Patterns in Passwords. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) (2021)

Alaadin Addas, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Geographic Hints for Passphrase Authentication. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) (2019)

Alaadin Addas, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe. Geographical Security Questions for Fallback Authentication. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) (2019)

Alaadin Addas, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari. Towards Models for Quantifying the Known Adversary. Proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) (2019)

Zeinab Joudaki, Julie Thorpe, Miguel Vargas Martin. Enhanced Tacit Secrets. International Journal of Information Security (2019)

Ruba Alomari, Julie Thorpe. On Password Behaviours and Attitudes in Different Populations [Author’s preprint]. Journal of Information Security and Applications (2019) Published Version

Zeinab Joudaki, Julie Thorpe, Miguel Vargas Martin. Reinforcing System-Assigned Passphrases Through Implicit Learning. ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’18) (2018)

Julie Thorpe, Zeinab Joudaki, Miguel Vargas Martin. System-Assigned Passwords You Can't Write Down, But Don't Need To. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) (2017)

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Brent MacRae. An Exploration of Geographic Authentication Schemes. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS) (2016)

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Robert Eric Burden. Systems, methods, and computer program products for providing video-passwords for user authentication. Patent number: 8966614 (2015)

R. Rodriguez Garcia, Julie Thorpe, M. Vargas Martin. Crypto-Assistant: Towards Facilitating Developer’s Encryption of Sensitive Data. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST) (2014)

Julie Thorpe, Muath Al-Badawi, Brent MacRae, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Miguel Vargas Martin. The Presentation Effect on Graphical Passwords. Proceedings of the 32nd SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) (2014)

Julie Thorpe, R. Veras, C. Collins, Julie Thorpe. On the Semantic Patterns of Passwords and their Security Impact. Proceedings of the 2014 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) (2014)

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Brent MacRae. Usability and Security Evaluation of GeoPass: a Geographic Location-Password Scheme. Proceedings of the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) (2013)

Rafael Veras, Julie Thorpe, Christopher Collins. Visualizing Semantics in Passwords: The Role of Dates. Proceedings of the Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec) (2012)

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, Robert Burden. Video-Passwords: Advertising While Authenticating. Proceedings of the New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) (2012)

Julie Thorpe, P.C. van Oorschot. Exploiting Predictability in Click-Based Graphical Passwords. Journal of Computer Security (2011)

Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari, P.C. van Oorschot. Purely Automated Attacks on PassPoints-Style Graphical Passwords. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (2010)

Amirali Salehi-Abari, Julie Thorpe, P.C. van Oorschot. On Purely Automated Attacks for Click-Based Graphical Passwords. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) (2008)

Julie Thorpe, P.C. van Oorschot. On Predictive Models and User-Drawn Graphical Passwords. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC) (2008)

Julie Thorpe. On the Predictability and Security of User Choice in Passwords. Ph.D. thesis (2008)

Julie Thorpe, P.C. van Oorschot. Human-Seeded Attacks and Exploiting Hot-Spots in Graphical Passwords. Proceedings of the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (2007)

Julie Thorpe, P.C. van Oorschot, Anil Somayaji. Pass-thoughts: Authenticating With Our Minds. Proceedings of the ACSA 2005 New Security Paradigms Workshop (2005)

Simon Simon Foley, Abe Singe, Michael E Locasto, Stelios Sidiroglou, Angelos D Keromytis, John McDermott, P.C. van Oorschot, Julie Thorpe, Anil Somayaji, Richard Ford, Mark Bush, Alex Boulatov. Highlights from the 2005 New Security Paradigms Workshop. 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’05) (2005)

Julie Thorpe, P. C. Van Oorschot. Towards Secure Design Choices for Implementing Graphical Passwords. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) (2004)

Julie Thorpe, P. C. Van Oorschot. Graphical Dictionaries and the Memorable Space of Graphical Passwords. In Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium (2004)

Deholo Nali, Julie Thorpe. Analyzing User Choice in Graphical Passwords. Technical Report TR-04-01 (2004)

Filter Publications

IT-SRG

IT Security Reading Group (IT-SRG)

The IT Security Reading Group (IT-SRG) is a group of UOIT students (graduate and senior undergraduate) and faculty members who are interested in computer security and privacy. We meet weekly for critical review and discussion of state-of-the-art security research papers. See below for the tentative schedule. All interested faculty and students are invited to join by contacting Julie Thorpe (firstname.lastname at uoit.ca).

The IT-SRG provides a venue for both faculty and students to:

Develop and discuss new ideas for security research
Critique and analyze cutting-edge security research
Determine how to put research into practice

All Schedules

Media

2014-2018: NDSS 2014 covered by Reader’s Digest, MetroLand Media, CBS News, CBC Radio, Toronto Star, New York Times, Rogers TV, Durham News
2013: SOUPS 2013 covered by RogersTV
2005-2006: NSPW 2005 covered by Wired, Popular Science Magazine, Slashdot, CBC News, BBC World News
2004: USENIX Security 2004 covered by Search Security