News

February 2026
Mirage: Private, Mobility-Based Routing for Censorship Evasion (with Zachary Ratliff, Ruoxing (David) Yang, Avery Bai, Harel Berger, Micah Sherr, and James Mickens) presented at Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2026.

July 2025
Censorship Evasion with Unidentified Protocol Generation (with Ryan Wails, Rob Jansen, Aaron Johnson, and Micah Sherr) presented atUSENIX Security 2025.

July 2025
Analyzing the AI Nudification Application Ecosystem (with Cassidy Gibson, Daniel Olszewski, Natalie Grace Brigham, Anna Crowder, Kevin R. B. Butler, Patrick Traynor, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Tadayoshi Kohno) presented at USENIX Security 2025.

May 2025
Chimera: Fuzzing P4 Network Infrastructure for Multi-Plane Bug Detection and Vulnerability Discovery (with Jiwon Kim, Dave (Jing) Tian, and Benjamin E. Ujcich) presented at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2025.

April 2025
Reflexivity & Reflection (R&R) for Sociotechnical Safety: Creating a Space for Collective Learning (with Jessica McClearn, Lucy Qin, Emily Tseng, Miranda Wei, Rikke Bjerg Jensen, Nora McDonald, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Micah Sherr) accepted to CSCW 2025.

April 2025
Co-Constructing the Future of Digital Intimacy (with Chris Geeng, Lucy Qin, Allison McDonald, Amna Batool, Diana Freed, Oliver L. Haimson, Jevan A. Hutson, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Micah Sherr) accepted to CSCW 2025.

April 2025
Public Opinions About Copyright for AI-Generated Art: The Role of Egocentricity, Competition, and Experience (with Gabriel Lima, Nina Grgic-Hlaca, and Elissa M. Redmiles) presented at ACM CHI 2025.

March 2025
SCIF: Privacy-Preserving Statistics Collection with Input Validation and Full Security (with Jianan Su, Laasya Bangalore, Harel Berger, Jason Yi, Sophia Castor, Muthu Venkitasubramaniam, and Micah Sherr) accepted to Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2025.

March 2025
On the Rival Nature of Data: Tech and Policy Implications (with Ayelet Gordon-Tapiero, Katrina Ligett, and Kobbi Nissim) presented at Symposium on Computer Science and Law (CSLAW), 2025.

January 2025
Models Matter: Setting Accurate Privacy Expectations for Local and Central Differential Privacy (with Mary Anne Smart, Priyanka Nanayakkara, Rachel Cummings, Gabriel Kaptchuk, and Elissa M. Redmiles) appeared in Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2025.

January 2025
Data Reconstruction: When You See It and When You Don’t (with Edith Cohen, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran, Kobbi Nissim, Uri Stemmer, and Eliad Tsfadia) presented at Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS), 2025.

December 2024
Credit Attribution and Stable Compression (with Roi Livni, Shay Moran, Kobbi Nissim, and Chirag Pabbaraju) presented at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

October 2024
Exploiting Temporal Vulnerabilities for Unauthorized Access in Intent-Based Networking (with Ben Weintraub, Jiwon Kim, Ran Tao, Cristina Nita-Rotaru, Hamed Okhravi, Dave (Jing) Tian, and Benjamin E. Ujcich) presented at ACM CCS 2024.

October 2024
“I Had Sort of a Sense that I Was Always Being Watched”: Examining Interpersonal Discomfort From Continuous Location-Sharing Applications (with Kevin Childs, Cassidy Gibson, Anna Crowder, Kevin Warren, Carson Stillman, Elissa M. Redmiles, Eakta Jain, Patrick Traynor, and Kevin R. B. Butler) presented at ACM CCS 2024.

October 2024
Repositioning Real-World Website Fingerprinting on Tor (with Rob Jansen, Ryan Wails, and Aaron Johnson) presented at Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2024.

August 8, 2024
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Community-Developed Techniques for Online Exam Proctoring Evasion (with Lucy Simko, Adryana Hutchinson, Alvin Isaac, Evan Fries, Micah Sherr, and Adam J Aviv) accepted to ACM CCS 2024.

July 15, 2024
On Precisely Detecting Censorship Circumvention in Real-World Networks, which appeared in NDSS 2024 (with Ryan Wails, George Arnold Sullivan, Micah Sherr, and Rob Jansen), awarded the Best Practical Award at Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI).

June 12, 2024
SpotProxy: Rediscovering the Cloud for Censorship Circumvention (with Patrick Tser Jern Kon, Sina Kamali, Jinyu Pei, Diogo Barradas, Ang Chen, Micah Sherr, and Moti Yung) accepted to USENIX Security (USENIX), 2024.

June 2024
“Did They F***ing Consent to That?”: Safer Digital Intimacy via Proactive Protection Against Image-Based Sexual Abuse (with Lucy Qin, Vaughn Hamilton, Sharon Wang, Yigit Aydinalp, Marin Scarlett, and Elissa M. Redmiles) accepted to USENIX Security 2024.

June 2024
“I feel physically safe but not politically safe”: Understanding the Digital Threats and Safety Practices of OnlyFans Creators (with Ananta Soneji, Vaughn Hamilton, Adam Doupé, Allison McDonald, and Elissa M. Redmiles) accepted to USENIX Security 2024.

June 2024
“I chose to fight, be brave, and to deal with it”: Threat Experiences and Security Practices of Pakistani Content Creators (with Lea Gröber, Waleed Arshad, Shanza, Angelica Goetzen, Elissa M. Redmiles, Maryam Mustafa, and Katharina Krombholz) accepted to USENIX Security 2024.

June 2024
SoK (or SoLK?): On the Quantitative Study of Sociodemographic Factors and Computer Security Behaviors (with Miranda Wei, Jaron Mink, Yael Eiger, Tadayoshi Kohno, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Franziska Roesner) accepted to USENIX Security 2024.

May 14, 2024
‘I can say I’m John Travolta… but I’m not John Travolt’: Investigating the Impact of Changes to Social Media Verification Policies’ on User Perceptions of Verified Accounts (with Carson Powers, Nickolas Gravel, Christopher Pellegrini, Micah Sherr, Michelle L. Mazurek, and Daniel Votipka) accepted to Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2024.

May 14, 2024
The Onion Unpeeled: User Perceptions vs. Realities of Tor’s Security and Privacy Properties (Poster) (with Harel Berger, Tianjian Hu, Adam J. Aviv, and Micah Sherr) accepted to Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2024.

May 2024
“Violation of my body:”: Perceptions of AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (with Natalie Grace Brigham, Miranda Wei, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Elissa M. Redmiles) accepted to Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2024.

May 2024
Analyzing User Engagement with TikTok’s Short Format Video Recommendations using Data Donations (with Savvas Zannettou, Olivia Nemes Nemeth, Oshrat Ayalon, Angelica Goetzen, Krishna P. Gummadi, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Franziska Roesner) presented at CHI 2024.

May 2024
It’s Trying Too Hard To Look Real: Deepfake Moderation Mistakes and Identity-Based Bias (with Jaron Mink, Miranda Wei, Collins W. Munyendo, Kurt Hugenberg, Tadayoshi Kohno, Elissa M. Redmiles, and Gang Wang) presented at CHI 2024.

March, 2024
Ben Ujcich awarded an NSF CAREER award.

January, 2024
Security Challenges of Intent-Based Networking (by Jiwon Kim, Dave (Jing) Tian, Hamed Okhravi, and Benjamin E. Ujcich) accepted to Communications of the ACM (CACM), 2024

2024
Provenance-Enabled Explainable AI (with Jiachi Zhang, Wenchao Zhou, and Benjamin E. Ujcich) accepted to Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (PACMMOD), 2024.

December 13, 2023
You can Find me Here: A Study of the Early Adoption of Geofeeds (by Rahel Fainchtein and Micah Sherr) accepted to Passive and Active Measurement Conference, 2024

July 11, 2023
NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge (by Patrick Tser Jern Kon, Aniket Gattani, Dhiraj Saharia, Tianyu Cao, Diogo Barradas, Ang Chen, Micah Sherr, and Benjamin E. Ujcich) accepted to IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2024

June 23, 2023
Cadence: A Simulator for Human Movement-based Communication Protocols (by Harel Berger, Adam J. Aviv, and Micah Sherr) accepted to Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET), 2023

June 22, 2023
On Precisely Detecting Censorship Circumvention in Real-World Networks (by Ryan Wails, George Arnold Sullivan, Micah Sherr, and Rob Jansen) accepted to Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2024

May 16, 2023
Eigen: End-to-End Resource Optimization for Large-Scale Databases on the Cloud (by Ji You Li, Jiachi Zhang, Wenchao Zhou, Yuhang Liu, Shuai Zhang, Zhuoming Xue, Ding Xu, Hua Fan, Fangyuan Zhou, and Feifei Li) accepted to International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), 2023

May 15, 2023
Proteus: Programmable Protocols for Censorship Circumvention (by Ryan Wails, Rob Jansen, Aaron Johnson, and Micah Sherr) accepted to Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), 2023.

May 1, 2023
Data-Explainable Website Fingerprinting with Network Simulation (by Rob Jansen and Ryan Wails) accepted to Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), 2023.”

February 24, 2023
Educators’ Perspectives of Using (or Not Using) Online Exam Proctoring (with David G. Balash, Rahel Fainchtein, Elena Korkes, Miles Grant, Micah Sherr, and Adam Aviv) accepted to USENIX Security 2023.

February 1, 2023
The GU SecLab welcomes Dr. Harel Berger! Harel is a postdoc researcher working on the MARATHON project (see below)

September 9, 2022
DARPA-funded Mobile Adaptive Relay Anti-Totalitarian Human Overlay Network (MARATHON) kicks off, a joint effort between Stealth Software Technologies, The George Washington University, and Georgetown University to build more resilient and censorship-resistant messaging systems

September 2, 2022
User Perceptions of the Privacy and Usability of Smart DNS (with Rahel Fainchtein, Adam Aviv, and Micah Sherr) conditionally accepted (with shepherding) to Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC)

April 15, 2022
NSF funds Security and Privacy Implications of Remote Proctoring for School Policies and Practices project, a collaborative effort between SecLab and the GWUSEC lab at George Washington Univ.

April 6, 2022
Learning to Behave: Improving Covert Channel Security with Behavior-Based Designs (with Ryan Wails, Andrew Stange, Eliana Troper, Aylin Caliskan, Roger Dingledine, Rob Jansen, and Micah Sherr) accepted to 22nd Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)

August 9, 2021
Examining the Examiners: Students’ Privacy and Security Perceptions of Online Proctoring Services (with David Balash, Dongkun Kim, Darika Shaibekova, Rahel A. Fainchtein, and Micah Sherr, and Adam J. Aviv) appears at Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS)

July 24, 2021
Accountable Private Set Cardinality for Distributed Measurement (with Ellis Fenske, Akshaya Mani, and Aaron Johnson) accepted to ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS)

July 15, 2021
Congratulations to Logan Arkema on winning the Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award at the 2021 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium for his paper on Residue-Free Computing

June 29, 2021
Version 2.0 of the NSF-funded Shadow project is now in pre-release!

May 21, 2021
Residue-Free Computing accepted to PoPETS 2021

April 19, 2021
Congratulations to Feiyang Yu for successfully defending his Master’s Thesis, Towards More Privacy-Preserving and Practical Internet-of-Things Devices

November 16, 2020
Jim Newsome (Tor Project) discusses Shadow 2.0 (a joint project between Georgetown, NRL, and Tor) at Tor’s State of the Onion.

November 1, 2020
Holes in the Geofence: Privacy Vulnerabilities in Smart DNS Services accepted to PoPETS 2021 (with shepherding condition).

August 12, 2020
Benjamin Ujcich joins Georgetown after completing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include secure systems and network design.

March 30, 2020
Bypassing Tor Exit Blocking with Exit Bridge Onion Services accepted to the 27th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS).

March 4, 2020
Ephemeral Exit Bridges for Tor accepted to the 50th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2020)