research

I’m currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Princeton’s Center for IT Policy and previously a Research Fellow at The Citizen Lab. I used to be a Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I maintained Certbot and wrote a bit about tech policy.

chinese app and network security ecosystem

Collaborating with The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, I studied various privacy and security aspects of Chinese applications, including WeChat and its application ecosystem, and popular Chinese IME keyboards. I'm currently conducting a larger-scale network security analyses of the broader Chinese mobile application ecosystem.

network censorship and circumvention

I've worked extensively on leveraging native traffic-splitting capabilities of modern networking protocols like QUIC for thwarting traffic analysis and circumventing censorship. I also collaborated with Censored Planet to study the deployment of network filters across the Internet.

tech & labor

I’m working on a few projects investigating post-COVID use of surveillance software in the workplace. I've researched how labor organizers threat model for privacy and security in online workplaces. I also co-ran a reading group that reads papers about global trends in algorithmic management and the effect of tech development on modern labor practices, centering the worker perspective.

papers

Analyzing the Tracking Ecosystem of WeChat Mini Programs: MMTLS Privacy and Information Flows (under review)
QUICstep: Circumventing QUIC‐based Censorship
Building the Epistemic Community of AI Safety
Account Verification on Social Media: User Perceptions and Paid Enrollment (USENIX Security 2023)
Self‐Censorship Under Law: A Case Study of the Hong Kong National Security Law (FOCI 2023)
Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining Censorship Devices (CoNEXT 2022)
Weaving Privacy and Power: On the Privacy Practices of Labor Organizers in the U.S. Technology Industry (ACM CSCW 2022)
Leveraging Strategic Connection Migration‐Powered Traffic Splitting for Privacy (PoPETS 2022)

other

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

art

I make oil paintings, murals, and lots of other things from wood and metal. In 2023, I led the design and fabrication of a large-scale wooden sculpture. Currently, I'm working on a kinetic sculpture based on Islamic parquet deformations.

I've been training in Thuluth Arabic calligraphy since 2017 and Sinii-style Arabic calligraphy since 2022 with Haji Noor Deen 米广江.

puzzles

I love doing puzzles. I also love writing puzzles! I've designed several puzzlehunts and escape rooms.

I helped Teammate write the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt, where I also designed the character and art for the Ascent round, vaguely based on "biblically accurate angel" memes and the Tower of Babel. The puzzles I am most proud of constructing are Book of Fixed Stars, a puzzle which utilizes Arabic, and Fountain.

My current puzzle obsession is the new wave of Chinese-language Mystery-hunt-style puzzlehunts written and run by Chinese universites' puzzle clubs!