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（ ´ ∀｀）＜ hi i'm mona! i do research, art, and puzzles
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｜ ｜ |
（＿＿_)＿）
github |
cv | monaw at berkeley dot edu
I'm a researcher working to protect our safety, privacy, and digital
freedoms on the Internet.
I'll be starting as an Assistant Professor at
The University of Toronto in January 2027, at the
Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, cross-appointed to the Department of Computer
Science, and affiliated with
The Citizen Lab.
I'm currently a postdoc with
Dawn Song at UC Berkeley.
I received my Ph.D. from Princeton CS at the
Center for IT Policy advised by
Jonathan
Mayer and
Prateek Mittal.
I was also previously a Staff Technologist at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I'm honored to have received the FOCI Rising Star Award,
the OTF Information Controls Fellowship,
the ACM CSCW Impact Recognition Award,
and the IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize.
Publications
* indicates co-first-authorship
-
Evaluating connection migration based QUIC censorship circumvention
PETS 2026
Seungju Lee, Mona Wang, Watson Jia, Qiang Wu, Henry Birge-Lee, Liang
Wang, Prateek Mittal
🏆 Andrea Pfitzmann Best Student Paper
-
WireWatch: Measuring the Security of Proprietary Network
Encryption in the Global Android Ecosystem
IEEE S&P 2025
Mona Wang, Jeffrey Knockel, Zoë Reichert, Prateek Mittal, Jonathan Mayer
🏆 HotPETS Best Talk 2024
-
What WeChat Knows: First-Party Tracking in a
Billion-User Super-App Ecosystem
PETS 2025
Mona Wang, Pellaeon Lin, Jeffrey Knockel, Will Greenberg, Jonathan
Mayer, Prateek Mittal
-
The Future of Tech Labor: How Workers are Organizing and Transforming the Computing Industry
ACM CSCW 2025
Cella Sum, Anna Konvicka, Mona Wang, Sarah Fox
-
The Not-So-Silent Type: Vulnerabilities in Chinese IME Keyboards' Network Security
Protocols
ACM CCS 2024
Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang, Zoë Reichert
-
Field-building and the Epistemic Culture of AI Safety
First Monday 2024
Shazeda Ahmed, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Archana Ahlawat, Amy Winecoff, Mona
Wang
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Account Verification on Social Media: User Perceptions and Paid
Enrollment
USENIX Security 2023
Madelyne Xiao, Mona Wang, Jonathan Mayer
-
Self‐Censorship Under Law: A Case Study of the Hong Kong National
Security Law
FOCI 2023
Mona Wang, Jonathan Mayer
- Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining
Censorship Devices
CoNEXT
2022
*Ram Sundara Raman, *Mona Wang, Jakub Dalek, Jonathan Mayer, Roya Ensafi
🏆 IRTF
Applied Networking Research Prize 2023
- Weaving Privacy and Power: On the Privacy Practices of Labor
Organizers in the U.S. Technology Industry
ACM CSCW 2022
*Sayash Kapoor, *Matthew Sun, *Mona Wang, Klaudia Jaźwińska, Elizabeth Watkins
🏆 Impact Recognition Award
- Leveraging Strategic Connection Migration‐Powered Traffic Splitting
for Privacy
PoPETS 2022
Mona Wang, Anunay Kulshrestha, Liang Wang, Prateek Mittal
🏆 HotPETS Best Talk 2021
🏆 Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper
Runner Up
Talks
-
Security Analysis of WeChat's MMTLS Encryption Protocol
Black Hat Asia 2025
Pellaeon Lin, Mona Wang
-
Is Your App Traffic Encrypted (Well)?
RightsCon 2025
Mona Wang, Jeffrey Knockel
-
Breaking network crypto in almost every popular Chinese keyboard app
DEFCON 2024
Jeffrey Knockel, Mona Wang
-
Protecting the Network Traffic of One Billion People: Reverse-Engineering Chinese Cryptography
HOPE XV 2024
Mona Wang, Jeffrey Knockel, Zoë Reichert
Other Writing
-
AI Alignment is Censorship, Reboot, 2025
-
Network Security Issues in RedNote, The Citizen Lab, 2025
- The Not-so-silent Type: Vulnerabilities across keyboard apps reveal keystrokes
to network eavesdroppers, The
Citizen Lab, 2024
- Vulnerabilities in Sogou Keyboard encryption expose keypresses to network
eavesdropping, The
Citizen Lab, 2023
- Should
We Chat? Privacy in the WeChat Ecosystem, The Citizen Lab, 2023
- Through The Wire, Logic Magazine, Issue 18, 2022