Adrienne Porter Felt
More info
- Affiliation
- UC Berkeley, Google
- Known for
- Android permissions, Chrome's "Not secure"
Researcher and engineer who turned usable security into something you could measure — and got Chrome to call plain HTTP insecure.
As a PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by David Wagner, Felt mapped out Android's permission system. "Android Permissions Demystified" (2011) found that roughly a third of the apps studied asked for more permissions than they used, often because the documentation was wrong. Follow-up studies showed that hardly any users read or understood the permission prompts.
At Google she led work on Chrome's security UI: certificate warnings people actually heed and, from 2018, a "Not secure" label on every page served without HTTPS. It was among the most effective single moves in getting the web encrypted — no new cryptography, just one word in the right place.