Nguyen Phong Hoang

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Computer Science

May 14 2016 (Update): the lastest version of this study can be found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303069938_Your_Neighbors_Are_My_Spies_Location_and_other_Privacy_Concerns_in_GLBT-focused_Location-based_Dating_Applications Trilateration has recently become one of the well-known threat models to the user's location privacy in loca...

Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and visualization of its structure through the Tor Metrics project. In contrast, I2P does not rely on centralized direc...

Centralized DNS over HTTPS/TLS (DoH/DoT) resolution , which has started being deployed by major hosting providers and web browsers, has sparked controversy among Internet activists and privacy advocates due to several privacy concerns. This design decision causes the trace of all DNS resolutions to be exposed to a third-party resolver, different th...

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...

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...

The arms race between Internet freedom advocates and censors has catalyzed the emergence of sophisticated blocking techniques and directed significant research emphasis toward the development of automated censorship measurement and evasion tools based on packet manipulation. However, we observe that the probing process of censorship middleboxes usi...

The proliferation of global censorship has led to the development of a plethora of measurement platforms to monitor and expose it. Censorship of the domain name system (DNS) is a key mechanism used across different countries. It is currently detected by applying heuristics to samples of DNS queries and responses (probes) for specific destinations....

Most online communications rely on DNS to map domain names to their hosting IP address(es). Previous work has shown that DNS-based network interference is widespread due to the unencrypted and unauthenticated nature of the original DNS protocol. In addition to DNS, accessed domain names can also be monitored by on-path observers during the TLS hand...

Most online communications rely on DNS to map domain names to their hosting IP address(es). Previous work has shown that DNS-based network interference is widespread due to the unencrypted and unauthenticated nature of the original DNS protocol. In addition to DNS, accessed domain names can also be monitored by on-path observers during the TLS hand...

With the Internet having become an indispensable means of communication in modern society, censorship and surveillance in cyberspace are getting more prevalent. Malicious actors around the world, ranging from nation states to private organizations, are increasingly making use of technologies to not only control the free flow of information, but als...

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...

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...

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...

Centralized DNS over HTTPS/TLS (DoH/DoT) resolution , which has started being deployed by major hosting providers and web browsers, has sparked controversy among Internet activists and privacy advocates due to several privacy concerns. This design decision causes the trace of all DNS resolutions to be exposed to a third-party resolver, different th...

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...

Measuring I2P Censorship at a Global Scale -- FOCI '19 Slides

The prevalence of Internet censorship has prompted the creation of several measurement platforms for monitoring filtering activities. An important challenge faced by these platforms revolves around the trade-off between depth of measurement and breadth of coverage. In this paper, we present an opportunistic censorship measurement infrastructure bui...

The prevalence of Internet censorship has prompted the creation of several measurement platforms for monitoring filtering activities. An important challenge faced by these platforms revolves around the trade-off between depth of measurement and breadth of coverage. In this paper, we present an opportunistic censorship measurement infrastructure bui...

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...

Tor and I2P are well-known anonymity networks used by many individuals to protect their online privacy and anonymity. Tor's centralized directory services facilitate the understanding of the Tor network, as well as the measurement and visualization of its structure through the Tor Metrics project. In contrast, I2P does not rely on centralized direc...

As we are living in the digital age, information technology appears in nearly every aspect of our daily lives, and plays an integral role in agriculture, industry, education, business, politics, etc. Thanks to its undeniable convenience, information technology has helped to make our lives easier and more comfortable. For instance, VoIP (voice over...

Trilateration is one of the well-known threat models to the user's location privacy in location-based apps; especially those contain highly sensitive information such as dating apps. The threat model mainly bases on the publicly shown distance from a targeted victim to the adversary to pinpoint the victim's location. As a countermeasure, most of lo...

Regardless of Tor's robustness against individual attackers thanks to its distributed characteristics, the network is still highly vulnerable to those very powerful adversaries, such as oppressive regimes which have control over a large proportion of the Internet. As recently confirmed by Edward Snowden, Autonomous-System level adversary is no long...

Digital information has become a social infrastructure and with the expansion of the Internet, network infrastructure has become an indispensable part of social life and industrial activity for mankind. The idea of using existing electronics in smart home appliances and connecting them to the Internet is a new dimension along which technologies con...

Nowadays, with the expansion of Internet connection around the World, more and more people get online. People use Internet for various activities such as accessing email, searching, shopping, social networking, etc. The Internet indeed provides its users with many conveniences. Sharing knowledge and getting communication among a large amount of Int...

Digital information has become a social infrastructure and with the expansion of the Internet, network infrastructure has become an indispensable part of social life and industrial activity for mankind. For various reasons, however, today's networks are vulnerable to numerous risks, such as information leakage, privacy infringement and data corrupt...