Researchers at RANDLab conduct network security and internet measurement research that often intersects with other subfields, including systems, privacy, internet freedom, human-computer interaction, technology policy, and sustainable computing. View our current project areas and related publications, blog posts, awards, and news media articles below.
Current Projects
🚫🌐 Global Internet Censorship & Connection Tampering
We build empirical techniques, platforms, and data analysis methods to study longitudinal Internet censorship on the global scale.
모 Network Devices Performing Deep Packet Inspection
We investigate the proliferation of powerful network devices that can inspect, filter, and tamper with large-scale traffic using DPI technology.
🔍 Privacy Laws, Policies, Practices, and Perspectives
We develop frameworks that analyzes how privacy practices, policies, perspectives, and operations change as new privacy and AI governance laws are introduced.
⚡️ Intelligent Network Measurements
We develop intelligent platforms that automate and optimize the measurement of events that affect Internet reachability such as Internet censorship, outages, shutdowns, and geoblocking.
❄ Practical Censorship Circumvention Tools
We evaluate the practical censorship resistance potential of popular circumvention tools such as Tor Snowflake, helping make them better resistant to nation-state level attacks.
🛡️ Emerging Security and Privacy Threats
We perform rapid studies of evolving network events, systematically documenting, reacting to, and defending against new and emerging threat models that affect Internet users.
Awards
Undergraduate Deans Award, Sriya Katreddi and Prassidh Pooskur, June 2025
Tor SEEKCOMMONS Fellowship, Rohit Nagubandi, February 2025
USENIX Security 2024 Distinguished Paper Award, “Digital Discrimination of Users in Sanctioned States: The Case of the Cuba Embargo”, August 2024
FOCI Best Practical Award, Network Responses to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: A Cautionary Tale for Internet Freedom“, July 2024
IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) 2023, “Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining Censorship Devices”, January 2023
Blog Posts and Reports
Cloudflare Blog: A Global Assessment of Third-Party Connection Tampering, 5 September 2024
Internet Society Pulse Blog: Measuring Connection Tampering Around the World, 24 October 2023
Internet Society Pulse Blog: Making Censorship Data More User Friendly, 4 May 2023
Open Technology Fund (OTF) News: Profiling Internet Censors: Methods to Measure and Locate Censorship Devices, 5 December 2022
APNIC Blog: An analysis of a large-scale HTTPS interception, 15 February 2021
Censored Planet: Technical Report: US Government and military websites are geoblocked from Hong Kong and China, 10 August 2020
Talks
IETF 118, Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining Censorship Devices , November 2023
OTF Summit 2023, Exploring Internet Censorship Data through the Censored Planet Dashboard, January 2023
RightsCon 2022, Exploring Internet censorship with the Censored Planet Dashboard , June 2022
The 5th Annual Data for Public Good Symposium, Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory, March 2022
OONI Internet Measurement Village, Censored Planet: Measuring Internet censorship remotely , June 2020
Media
Lookout Santa Cruz: “As a new state bill pushes back against license plate cameras, Watsonville looks to add more.”
Private Internet Access: “New research confirms Kazakhstan is spying on connections to Facebook, Twitter, VK, Instagram, Youtube, Google, and more“