Thea Ullegård Kjeldsmark

I am a PhD Computer Science student at the University of California, Irvine, advised by Prof. Habiba Farrukh. My research focuses on security and privacy for emerging technologies.

I hold an MS in Computer Science from UC Irvine and a BSc in Software Development from the IT University of Copenhagen. During my masters, I spent a summer as a research fellow at ETH Zürich in the Advanced Software Technologies Lab.

Outside academics, I have interned as a software engineer at J.P. Morgan and Microsoft. I have also had the opportunity to live in seven different countries: Denmark, USA, South Korea, Scotland (UK), Ireland, Egypt, and Switzerland.

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News

Sep 2026 Our paper on security and privacy disclosures across XR apps was accepted at NDSS ‘27!
Jan 2026 Started mentoring undergraduates through the UCI Undergraduate Research Discovery Program
Aug 2025 Successfully defended my MS thesis and excited to start my PhD at UCI :tada:
Mar 2025 Received a travel grant to participate in the Women in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) Conference
Mar 2025 Our paper on batteryless device security and privacy was accepted at Sensors S&P ‘25!

Publications

  1. One App, Many Realities: A Cross-Store Study of Security and Privacy Disclosures in XR Apps
    Thea U. Kjeldsmark, Xiaokuan Zhang, and Habiba Farrukh
    Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS), 2027
    To appear.
  2. Intermittent Power, Continuous Protection: Security and Privacy for Batteryless Devices in IoT
    Thea U. Kjeldsmark, Hui Zhuang, Habiba Farrukh, and Muslum Ozgur Ozmen
    The 2nd International Workshop on Security and Privacy of Sensing Systems (Sensors S&P), 2025
  3. Expanding the Scope of Grammar-Based Enumerative Testing
    Thea U. Kjeldsmark
    Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) Student Research Competition, 2025