I'm Alisha Ukani

I'm a final-year CS PhD candidate at UC San Diego. My research focuses on measuring and improving web privacy, focusing on how technology interacts with society and governments. My advisor is Alex C. Snoeren.

📣 I'm looking for post-doc opportunities to start in Fall 2026.

I'm supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and previously, the ARCS Foundation San Diego Fellowship. I also served as the Co-President of UCSD's Graduate Women in Computing (GradWIC) group.

You can contact me at aukani@ucsd.edu.

News

  • 2025-06-19 - I started a summer internship at Brave Software to analyze the privacy properties of LLM browser agents
  • 2025-05-23 - Our work "Local Frames: Exploiting Inherited Origins to Bypass Content Blockers" was accepted to CCS 2025!
  • 2025-02-03 - Our work "Practical Support for Integrity Validation of Criminal Legal Process" was accepted to the work-in-progress track of CS&Law 2025

Select Publications

Local Frames: Exploiting Inherited Origins to Bypass Content Blockers

A. Ukani, H. Haddadi, A.C. Snoeren, P. Snyder
Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025
[Preprint] [Data]

The Double Edged Sword: Identifying Authentication Pages and their Fingerprinting Behavior

A. Senol*, A. Ukani*, D. Cutler, I. Bilogrevic
The Web Conference (WWW) 2024
[Paper] [Promo video] [Slides]

Measuring UID Smuggling in the Wild

A. Randall, P. Snyder, A. Ukani, A.C. Snoeren, G. Voelker, S. Savage, A. Schulman
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022
[Paper]

Locked-In during Lock-Down: Undergraduate Life on the Internet in a Pandemic

A. Ukani, A. Mirian, A.C. Snoeren
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2021
[Paper] [Video]

*Indicates equal contributions

Select Awards

  • UCSD CSE Award for Service/Leadership (2024)
  • NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2022)
  • ARCS Foundation San Diego Fellowship (2021-2024)
  • UCSD CSE Award for Contributions to Diversity (2022)

Select Talks

Country-in-the-Middle: Measuring Paths between People and their Governments

  • CAIDA GMI-AIMS-5 Workshop (February 2025)

The Double Edged Sword: Identifying Authentication Pages and their Fingerprinting Behavior

  • University of Maryland (September 2024)
  • UCSD CNS Research Review (May 2024)
  • MIT PDOS Group (March 2024)
  • Northeastern University (March 2024)
  • Boston University Security Seminar (March 2024)

Locked-In during Lock-Down: Undergraduate Life on the Internet in a Pandemic

  • UCSD CSE Research Open House (March 2022)
  • Stanford Empirical Security Research Group (November 2021)
  • Google Seminar (September 2021)
  • Google PhD Intern Research Conference (July 2021)
  • MIT Security Seminar (May 2021)