Mozilla Security Research Summit 2025

March 1, 2025 9:00am - 6:00pm San Diego, California

The Mozilla Security Research summit will be hosted in San Diego as part of Mozilla's Security Engineering University Relationship Framework (SURF) initiative. This initiative aims to increase collaboration between Mozilla and the academic community, so as to leverage academic talent to help explore Mozilla-specific security and privacy engineering research problems, and to strengthen Mozilla's ties to the academic community.

The summit audience will consist of a mix of Mozilla engineers, academics, and PhD students. Our intention is for Mozilla engineers to "pitch" research problems to the academic community, so as to spark potential collaboration. Our engineers and researchers plan to deliver talks covering areas such as tracking protection, language-based security, cryptography, web measurement and machine learning.

The day will also include some high-caliber talks from security and privacy academics, as well as some fast-paced PhD lightning talks. The event will include ample time for discussion throughout the day and will conclude with a panel discussion.

Please join us to help improve the open web!

Venue

University of California San Diego 3235 Voigt Dr. La Jolla, CA 92094 Computer Science & Engineering Building Room 1242

Agenda

Speakers

Christoph Kerschbaumer

Manager, Security Engineering
Mozilla

Christoph has over two decades of experience in software engineering and computer security. His work ranges from designing secure systems with fail-safe defaults to fighting cross-site scripting to preventing man-in-the-middle attacks. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, where he focused his research on information flow tracking techniques within web browsers.

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John Schanck

Security Researcher
Mozilla

John is a cryptography engineer on the Network Security Services team at Mozilla. He has done extensive work on mitigating the threat to Internet security that is posed by quantum computers. In particular he is a co-author of the NTRU and Kyber key encapsulation mechanisms, both of which are finalists in NIST's post-quantum cryptography standardization effort. John received his PhD in Mathematics from the department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo.

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Dennis Jackson

Security Researcher
Mozilla

Dennis’ research interests include applied cryptography, protocol design and formal verification. His work includes clarifying the precise security properties of Ed25519, formally verifying the security of the Noise key exchange framework, and discovering new attacks on deployed protocols like Secure Scuttlebutt’s authenticated transport. He is also a Core Contributor at the Tor Project, where he works with the Network Health team.

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Benjamin VanderSloot

Privacy Researcher
Mozilla

Ben is an engineer on the Privacy & Protections team at Mozilla. His research interests focus on privacy harms and experiences of users on the Web. Ben received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan.

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Participants