McKenna McCall

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.

Research

Students in my lab are currently working on research related to the usability of security-typed languages and security and privacy for smart home users. Read more about our ongoing projects here. A complete list of publications can be found here.

Recent Papers

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. PoPETS 2026 (1). [PDF]

"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. 2026. [PDF]

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. 2025. [PDF]

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]

^*These authors contributed to this work equally.

Teaching

Usable Formal Methods for Security/Privacy (CS 580) F25, F26

  Formal methods offer a mathematically-rigorous way to reason about the security of software and software systems. However, formal methods research often ignores the human element of the systems they aim to protect. This course is designed to expose students to the human factors of formal methods for security. The main objectives of this course are to introduce students to some of the core principles of security and privacy, several topics in formal methods and usable security, and the peer-review process.

Service

Conference and Workshop Organizing

  PLDI 2026 Local Arrangements Co-Chair

Professional Service

  DARPA ISAT COMPASS Workshop Invited Expert, 2026

  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, 2025-27

  IEEE S&P Program Committee, 2022, 2027

  PETS Program Committee, 2027

  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 Shadow PC, 2021