Roya Ensafi

Morris Wellman Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering , University of Michigan

OTF Advisory Council
Founder and Director of Censored Planet Lab
Dissonance Organizing Committee

Email:  ensafi [@] umich.edu
Twitter:  @royaensafi
● Bio ● CV ● Google Scholar
● More about me: [1], [2]

Recent Awards:
Sloan Research Fellowship
NSF CAREER (2023)
IRTF Applied Networking (2016,2023)
USENIX Security Internet Defense Prize (2022)

My research broadly lies at the intersection of networking, security and privacy, and Internet measurement. I build scalable techniques and systems to protect users’ Internet experiences from disruption, surveillance, and digital inequity. My work takes a data-driven approach to detecting and defending against powerful network intermediaries, government threat actors, and technologies and practices that impact users’ freedom of expression online.

Members of my lab

Alumni include: Name (Postdoc/PhD/Master/Undergrad--> immdidate position after graduating)
Reethika Ramesh (PhD student → Senior Staff Researcher at Palo Alto Networks.),Renuka Kumar (PhD student → Software Engineer IV at Cisco),Muhammad Ikram (Postdoc→ Lecturer, Macquarie University), Gavin Li(Undergrad→ Graduate Student, Standford), Apurva Virkud (Undergrad→ PhD Student, UIUC), <, Kevin Wang(Undergrad), Arham Jain (Undergrad→ Software Engineer, Google), Yael Eiger(Software engineer→ PhD Student, Washington University), Kyle Astroth(Masters student→), Anjali Vyas (Undergrad→ Masters Student, Cornell Tech), Rose Ceccio (Undergrad→ PhD Student, Wisconsin - Madison), Victor Ongkowijaya (Undergrad→ PhD Student, Princeton), Adrian Stoll (Undergrad→ Software Engineer, Google), Prerana Shenoy (Undergrad→ Product Security Engineer, Atlassian), Leonid Evdokimov, Elio Qoshi (→ Ura Design).

I have multiple openings for PhD students and a postdoctoral fellow. Join me to protect users' Internet experiences from censorship, surveillance, and digital inequity!

Selected Publications   ⇒ All Publications

• Digital Discrimination of Users in Sanctioned States: The Case of the Cuba Embargo
  A. Ablove, S. Chandrashekaran, H. Le, R. Sundara Raman, R. Ramesh, R. Oppenheimer, R. Ensafi
  In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2024
  🏆 Distinguished paper award
  
• CalcuLatency: Leveraging Cross-Layer Network Latency Measurements to Detect Proxy-Enabled Abuse
  R. Ramesh, P. Winter, S. Korman, R. Ensafi
  In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2024
  
• Bridging Barriers: A Survey of Challenges and Priorities in the Censorship Circumvention Landscape
  D. Xue, A. Ablove, R. Ramesh, G. Kwak Danciu, R. Ensafi
  In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2024
  
• Fingerprinting Obfuscated Proxy Traffic with Encapsulated TLS Handshakes
  D. Xue, M. Kallitsis, A. Houmansadr, and R. Ensafi
  In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2024
  
• “All of them claim to be the best”: A multi-perspective study of VPN users and VPN providers
  R. Ramesh, A. Vyas, R. Ensafi
  In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2023
  
• Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining Censorship Devices
  R. Sundara Raman, M. Wang, J. Dalek, J. Mayer, R. Ensafi
  In: ACM Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments & Technologies (CoNEXT), December 2022
  🏆 IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize winner
OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting
D. Xue, R. Ramesh, A. Jain, M. Kallitsis, A. Halderman, J. R. Crandall, R. Ensafi
In: USENIX Security Symposium, August 2022
🏆 Distinguished paper award
🏆 Won First Prize 🏆 in the 2022 Internet Defense Prize

• VPNalyzer: Systematic Investigation of the VPN Ecosystem
  R. Ramesh, L. Evdokimov, D. Xue, R. Ensafi
  In: NDSS, April 2022
  🏆 Won First Place at the CSAW '22 Applied Research Competition.
  
• Throttling Twitter: An Emerging Censorship Technique in Russia
  D. Xue, R. Ramesh, ValdikSS, L. Evdokimov, A. Viktorov, A. Jain, E. Wustrow, S. Basso, R. Ensafi
  In: ACM IMC, November 2021
  🏆 Recognized as the Highest Scoring Short Paper
• Examining How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers
  R. Ensafi, D. Fifield, P. Winter, N. Feamster, N. Weaver, V. Paxson
  In: ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), October 2015
  🏆 IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize winner

Teaching   ⇒ All Teaching

EECS 388 Introduction to Security

University of Michigan [Winter 2020, Fall 2022, Fall 2023]

Course Description: This course teaches the security mindset and introduces the principles and practices of computer security as applied to software, host systems, and networks. I hope any interested CS undergraduate students take this course.

Prerequisites: EECS 281 required; EECS 201 and EECS 370 recommended.

Talks   ⇒ Additional Talks

Research in the news   ⇒ All Press

• Governments are finding new ways to squash free expression online The Economist, 2021.
• Russia is Censoring the Internet, With Coercion and Block Boxes. New York Times, 2021.
• Russia’s Twitter throttling may give censors never-before-seen capabilities. Ars Technica, 2021.
• Academics: Russia deployed new technology to throttle Twitter’s traffic. The Record, 2021.
• Kazakhstan's HTTPS interception efforts target Facebook, Google, Twitter, others ZDNet, 2019.
• Google and Mozilla move to stop Kazakhstan 'snooping' BBC, 2019.
• Google and Mozilla release statements [1, 2] and take action based on our Kazakhstan report. 2019.
• Study: Russia’s web-censoring tool sets pace for imitators Associated Press, 2019.
• US blocks Hong Kong users from some government websites Financial Times, 2020.

Updates   ⇒ All Updates

• October 2022: I served as Publicity Chair for IMC'22.
• September 2022: I served as Chair for EGS'22.
• August 2022: Our paper, A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps, appeared in USENIX Security Symposium.
• August 2022: I am the program co-chair for FOCI'22.
• August 2022 I served on the PC for Sec'22.
• June 2022: I served as Co-Technical-Chair for TMA'22.
• May 2022: I was a finalist for the ACUM Outstanding Advisor Award.
• April 2022: I was a panelist on The Feeling of Being Watched, sponsored by Dissonance, ITS, and Wallace House.
• February 2022: I was invited to talk at Brave about The Story of Censored Planet
• January 2022: I was an invited Panelist and consultant for White House officials on existing projects for The Alliance for the Future of the Internet.
• December 2021: Invited by the President of the United States, I participated on Democracy–Affirming Technology panel at The Summit for Democracy..
• November 2021: We uploaded a recorded version of our Censored Planet Webinar.