Recent Awards:
Sloan Research Fellowship
NSF CAREER (2023)
IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (2016,2023)
USENIX Security Internet Defense Prize (2022)
Consumer Report Digital Lab Fellow (2021)
Google Faculty Research Award (2018)
NSF CNS Research Initiation Initiative (2018)
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.
I have multiple openings for PhD students and a postdoctoral fellow. Join me to protect users' Internet experiences from censorship, surveillance, and digital inequity!
Flagship Projects
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.
Splintering Net: 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 more about this project at https://splintering.net.
These are just my lab flagship projects. Please refer to my publication page or contact me for more information about my lab projects.
TSPU: Russia's Decentralized Censorship System
D. Xue, B. Mixon-Baca, ValdikSS, M. Kallitsis, A. Ablove, B. Kujath, J. Crandall, R. Ensafi
To appear in: Internet Measurement Conference 2022, (IMC ’22), October 2022
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 🏆 Distinguished paper award 🏆 Won First Prize 🏆 in the 2022 Internet Defense Prize
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.
