Recent Awards:
Consumer Report Digital Lab Fellow (2021)
Google Faculty Research Award (2018)
NSF CNS Research Initiation Initiative (2018)
IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (2016)
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.
Censored Planet: Censored Planet is a platform that provides continuous, global data about Internet censorship practices in countries around the world. It builds on my long line of work developing remote censorship measurement techniques. My group operates several of these systems, curates the data, and publishes continuous datasets about the reachability of thousands of sensitive websites from more than 221 countries. In partnership with Google Jigsaw, we recently launched a cloud-based data analysis pipeline and a visualization dashboard, facilitating use of our data by more
than 100 organizations spanning research and human rights advocacy. Some of our high profile rapid response investigations include Kazakhstan HTTPS interception and Russia’s throttling of Twitter. Read more about this project at https://censoredplanet.org.
VPNalyzer: VPNalyzer aims to analyze the commercial VPN ecosystem through three parallel efforts: a cross-platform user-
facing tool that facilitates rigorous, efficient, and continuous checks of VPNs’ security and privacy; large-scale user studies to understand the needs of VPN users; and qualitative studies surveying VPN providers to understand their technical and operational challenges and to uncover dark patterns in their operations, pricing, and marketing. VPNalyzer was awarded the Consumer Reports Digital Lab fellowship, read more about this project at https://vpnalyzer.org.
Internet geo-equity: The Internet is becoming increasingly regionalized due to sanctions, financial regulations, copyright and licensing rights, perceived abuse, or a perceived lack of customers. We conduct measurement studies to understand how these issues affect user’s experience from different geolocation (geo-equity). Read 403 Forbidden for the web ecosystem, and see https://geodiff.app for the mobile ecosystem.
These are just my lab flagship projects. Please refer to my publication page or contact me for more information about my lab projects.
OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting
D. Xue, R. Ramesh, A. Jain, M. Kallitsis, A. Halderman, J. R. Crandall, R. Ensafi
In: USENIX Security, August 2022
Course Description: Intensive research seminar covers foundations, research literature, and current topics in computer systems security. This course prepares graduate students for security-related research, and helps them gain hands-on experience designing and evaluating secure systems.
Prerequisites: EECS 482 Operating Systems, EECS 489 Computer Networks, EECS 388 Introduction to Security, or grad standing.
November 2020: Our NDSS '20 paper on Russia was selected as a finalist and was among the Top 10 papers for the US-Canada region at the CSAW '20 Applied Research Competition.
October 2020: Ram presented our paper (nominated for the best paper award!) on investigating HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan at IMC '20.
September 2020: I was on the steering committee for WTMC '20 (colocated with Euro S&P).
September 2020: I was named as a Consumer Reports Digital Lab Fellow for 2020-21! My team will be investigating the VPN ecosystem through large-scale data-driven analysis.
September 2020: I was awarded a DRL Internet Freedom grant (PI) for the project Censored Planet: A Global Observatory for Internet Censorship.
August 2020: I co-chaired FOCI '20. This was the 10th anniversary of FOCI (Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet, colocated with USENIX Security), with a record number of submitted papers (2x past years and 2021), registered participants, and attendees per talk (70 on average). My PhD student, Reethika served as the Student Organizer.
August 2020: We published a report on US websites geoblocked in Hong Kong.
June 2020: Ram gave a talk on the Censored Planet observatory at OONI IMV '20.
February 2020: We published a report on Filtermap.
January 2020: I gave an invited talk, Censorship Proliferation: Three Transformations in the Globally Spreading Practice of Online Censorship, at Princeton CITP, Iowa University, and Macquarie University.
December 2019: I was on the organizing committee for Big-DAMA '19 (colocated with ACM CoNEXT).
November 2019: We published a report on Russia's decentralized censorship model.
August 2019: I founded WISER, a group for Women in SEcurity Research. I also serve as the faculty advisor.
July 2019: Ram and Reethika attended the 2019 Citizen Lab Summer Institute through Citizen Lab's travel grants and hosted a session on investigating MitM interceptions in Kazakhstan.
July 2019: We published a report on Kazakhstan's HTTPS interception.
