About
I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Colorado State University. My research is at the intersection of formal methods and usable security. More specifically, I am interested in finding ways to help users (even ones without technical backgrounds) write policies and understand the theoretical guarantees these formal systems can provide.
Prior to coming to Colorado State, I completed a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, supervised by Lujo Bauer and Lorrie Cranor. I received my PhD in 2023 from the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Limin Jia. For my undergraduate, I double majored in Computer Science and Mathematics and minored in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Kansas State University.
If you are doing research with me, I prefer to be called "McKenna". In the classroom, I have no preference between Professor/Doctor McKenna/McCall. I pronounce my own name "muh-ken-nuh muh-call," but pronouncing the "Mc" like in "McDonalds" is also perfectly acceptable.
Publications
"You do understand that people don't trust technology?": Explaining Trusted Execution Environments to Non-Experts.
McKenna McCall*, Carolina Carreira*, Miguel Flores, and Lorrie Faith Cranor. Under review. [Pre-Print]
Location-Enhanced Information Flow for Home Automations.
McKenna McCall*, Ben Weinshel*, Kunlin Cai, Ying Li, Eric Zeng, Devika Manohar, Lujo Bauer, Limin Jia, and Yuan Tian. PETS 2026. To appear. [Pre-Print]
Tainted Secure Multi-Execution to Restrict Attacker Influence.
McKenna McCall, Abhishek Bichhawat, and Limin Jia. CCS 2023. [PDF] [TR]
Towards Usable Security Analysis Tools for Trigger-Action Programming.
McKenna McCall, Eric Zeng, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Mitchell Yang, Lujo Bauer, Abhishek Bichhawat, Camille Cobb, Limin Jia, and Yuan Tian. SOUPS 2023. [PDF] [Data]
Information Flow Control for Dynamic Reactive Systems.
McKenna McCall. Carnegie Mellon University 2023 (PhD thesis). [PDF]
Compositional Information Flow Monitoring for Reactive Programs.
McKenna McCall, Abhishek Bichhawat, and Limin Jia. Euro S&P 2022. [PDF] [TR]
Gradual Security Types and Gradual Guarantees.
Abhishek Bichhawat, McKenna McCall, and Limin Jia. CSF 2021. [PDF] Earlier version [TR]
Knowledge-based Security of Dynamic Secrets for Reactive Programs.
McKenna McCall, Hengruo Zhang, and Limin Jia. CSF 2018. [PDF] [TR]
A Sequent Calculus for Counterfactual Reasoning.
McKenna McCall, LayKuan Loh, and Limin Jia. PLAS 2017 [PDF] [TR]
*These authors contributed to this work equally.
Unpublished Reports
RTBAS: Defending LLM Agents Against Prompt Injection and Privacy Leakage.
Peter Yong Zhong*, Siyuan Chen*, Ruiqi Wang, McKenna McCall, Ben L. Titzer, Heather Miller, and Phillip B. Gibbons. [PDF]
SafeTAP: An Efficient Incremental Analyzer for Trigger-Action Programs.
McKenna McCall, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Abhishek Bichhawat, Camille Cobb, Limin Jia, Yuan Tian, Cooper Grace, Mitchell Yang. [TR]
*These authors contributed to this work equally.
Honors & Awards
IEEE Euro S&P 2022 Outstanding Presentation Award for Compositional Information Flow Monitoring for Reactive Programs
IEEE S&P (Oakland) 2021 Shadow PC Distinguished Reviewer
Service
Professional Service
Cyber Resilience Forum Attendee, 2025
NSF SaTC Vision 2.0 Workshop Attendee, 2023
University and Departmental Service
CS Undergraduate Program Committee
Program Committees
USENIX Security Program Committee, 2025-26
CSF Program Committee, 2025-26
CCS Program Committee, 2026
PLAS Program Committee, 2025
CPRA Program Committee, 2025
PriSC Program Committee, 2023-24
FCS Program Committee, 2023
CCS Poster Committee, 2022
IEEE S&P (Oakland) Program Committee, 2022
IEEE S&P (Oakland) Shadow PC, 2021
Teaching
Usable Formal Methods for Security/Privacy (CS 580) F25