Arian Akhavan Niaki

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · School of Computer Science

Transport Layer Security (TLS), has become the de-facto standard for secure Internet communication. When used correctly, it provides secure data transfer, but used incorrectly, it can leave users vulnerable to attacks while giving them a false sense of security. Numerous efforts have studied the adoption of TLS (and its predecessor, SSL) and its us...

Researchers have studied Internet censorship for nearly as long as attempts to censor contents have taken place. Most studies have however been limited to a short period of time and/or a few countries; the few exceptions have traded off detail for breadth of coverage. Collecting enough data for a comprehensive, global, longitudinal perspective rema...

Net neutrality has been the subject of considerable public debate over the past decade. Despite the potential impact on content providers and users, there is currently a lack of tools or data for stakeholders to independently audit the net neutrality policies of network providers. In this work, we address this issue by conducting a one-year study o...

Understanding web co-location is essential for various reasons. For instance, it can help one to assess the collateral damage that denial-of-service attacks or IP-based blocking can cause to the availability of co-located web sites. However, it has been more than a decade since the first study was conducted in 2007. The Internet infrastructure has...

As Internet users have become more savvy about the potential for their Internet communication to be observed, the use of network traffic encryption technologies (e.g., HTTPS/TLS) is on the rise. However, even when encryption is enabled, users leak information about the domains they visit via their DNS queries and via the Server Name Indication (SNI...

Although the security benefits of domain name encryption technologies such as DNS over TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) are clear, their positive impact on user privacy is weakened by—the still exposed—IP address information. However, content delivery networks, DNS-based load balancing, co-hosting of different websi...

The DNS filtering apparatus of China's Great Firewall (GFW) has evolved considerably over the past two decades. However, most prior studies of China's DNS filtering were performed over short time periods, leading to unnoticed changes in the GFW's behavior. In this study, we introduce GFWatch, a large-scale, longitudinal measurement platform capable...

DNS cache probing infers whether users of a DNS resolver have recently issued a query for a domain name, by determining whether the corresponding resource record (RR) is present in the resolver’s cache. The most common method involves performing DNS queries with the “recursion desired” (RD) flag set to zero, which resolvers typically answer from th...

Domain name encryptions (DoTH and ESNI) have been proposed to improve security and privacy while browsing the web. Although the security benefit is clear, the positive impact on user privacy is still questionable. Given that the mapping between domains and their hosting IPs can be easily obtained, the websites a user visits can still be inferred by...

Understanding web co-location is essential for various reasons. For instance, it can help one to assess the collateral damage that denial-of-service attacks or IP-based blocking can cause to the availability of co-located web sites. However, it has been more than a decade since the first study was conducted in 2007. The Internet infrastructure has...

Researchers have studied Internet censorship for nearly as long as attempts to censor contents have taken place. Most studies have however been limited to a short period of time and/or a few countries; the few exceptions have traded off detail for breadth of coverage. Collecting enough data for a comprehensive, global, longitudinal perspective rema...

First standardized by the IETF in the 1990's, SSL/TLS is the most widely-used encryption protocol on the Internet. This makes it imperative to study its usage across different platforms and applications to ensure proper usage and robustness against attacks and vulnerabilities. While previous efforts have focused on the usage of TLS in the desktop e...

The increasing demand for Web services encourages commercial cloud service providers to publish their own services with various functional and nonfunctional capabilities in different cloud platforms. The aggregation of atomic services from multiple service repositories is the main idea of the service composition concept in multiclouds. The cloud We...

Middleboxes implement a variety of network management policies (e.g., prioritizing or blocking traffic) in their networks. While such policies can be beneficial (e.g., blocking malware) they also raise issues of network neutrality and freedom of speech when used for application-specific differentiation and censorship. There is a poor understanding...