Carolina Carreira

I am a Ph.D. Student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (by Prof. Nicolas Christin) and Instituto Superior Técnico at the University of Lisbon (by Prof. João F. Ferreira and Prof. Alexandra Mendes).

My current research interests are usable security, software engineering. My focus is asymmetric communication in contexts of security and privacy. I’m interested in understanding how experts, end-users, and companies communicate about privacy and how we can improve this communication.

I also love volunteering, and I’m currently part of the Cylab Student Seminar Committee. I’m also collaborating with the Portuguese Red Cross, teaching young Afghan refugees programming. I played the violin and was part of my university musical group – TMIST. My hobbies include hiking and reading unpublished books.

Feel free to contact me using my socials to discuss any of these topics.

News

Nov 20, 2023	Was very happy to attend the 2023 CyLab Partners Conference
Oct 2, 2023	I joined the Student Seminar Planning committee at Cylab in CMU!
Oct 1, 2023	Presented a poster and attended the CMU Portugal 2023 Summit
Aug 11, 2023	Just arrived at CMU for 12 months! 🇺🇸
Jun 23, 2023	I am very honored to have won an Excellence in Teaching Award from Instituto Superior Técnico in its 112th aniversary for my students’ reviews and opinions of the past courses I TA’ed at.

Selected publications

appFM’21

Exploring Usable Security to Improve the Impact of Formal Verification: A Research Agenda

Carreira, Carolina, Ferreira, João F, Mendes, Alexandra, and Christin, Nicolas

First Workshop on Applicable Formal Methods (co-located with Formal Methods 2021). 2021

Abs

As software becomes more complex and assumes an even greater role in our lives, formal verification is set to become the gold standard in securing software systems into the future, since it can guarantee the absence of errors and entire classes of attack. Recent advances in formal verification are being used to secure everything from unmanned drones to the internet. At the same time, the usable security research community has made huge progress in improving the usability of security products and end-users comprehension of security issues. However, there have been no human-centered studies focused on the impact of formal verification on the use and adoption of formally verified software products. We propose a research agenda to fill this gap and to contribute with the first collection of studies on people’s mental models on formal verification and associated security and privacy guarantees and threats. The proposed research has the potential to increase the adoption of more secure products and it can be directly used by the security and formal methods communities to create more effective and secure software tools.
INFORUM’21

Towards Improving the Usability of Password Managers

Carreira, Carolina, Ferreira, João F, and Mendes, Alexandra

INFORUM 2021

Abs

Security experts strongly recommend the use of Password Managers (PMs). However, PMs are not widely used and studies indi- cate usability problems and distrust from users as the reasons for their low adoption. In this paper, we review usability challenges of PMs and we propose the use of known usability best practices and techniques to extend and improve Bitwarden, a widely-popular open-source PM. Since this work is done in the context of the PassCert project, which aims to build a formally verified PM, we also investigate ways to effectively convey to users the formally verified properties. We report on prelim- inary results and we propose a methodology to evaluate our extension of Bitwarden and to determine the impact of formal verification on the adoption of PMs.
PhD-iFM’22

Studying Users’ Willingness to Use a Formally Verified Password Manager

Carreira, Carolina

PhD Symposium at the 17th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM) 2022