I'm Alisha Ukani

I'm a CS PhD student at UC San Diego. I research web security and privacy from an empirical lens. My advisor is Alex Snoeren and I'm a member of the SysNet and CryptoSec groups.

I finished my undergrad degree in CS at Harvard in 2020. I conducted research with Eddie Kohler and James Mickens on stateful serverless computing and browser extension sandboxing.

Off campus, I served on the City of Cambridge's Open Data Review Board. I've also been a Research Intern at Google and a Software Engineering intern at Slack and Google.

I am supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the ARCS Foundation San Diego Fellowship.

You can contact me at aukani@ucsd.edu.

News

  • 2022-11-17 - I earned my MS degree, and I'm excited to continue with the rest of the PhD program
  • 2022-08-17 - Our paper on bounce tracking detection was accepted to IMC 2022!
  • 2022-06-13 - Started a research internship at Google working to detect browser fingerprinting on the Privacy Sandbox team
  • 2022-04-04 - Awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Publications

  1. "In the Line of Fire: Risks of DPI-triggered Data Collection," A. Mirian, A. Ukani, I. Foster, G. Akiwate, T. Halicioglu, C. Moore, A.C. Snoeren, G. Voelker, S. Savage, Proceedings of Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET) 2023.
  2. "Measuring UID Smuggling in the Wild," A. Randall, P. Snyder, A. Ukani, A. Snoeren, G. Voelker, S. Savage, A. Schulman. Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022.
  3. "Locked-In during Lock-Down: Undergraduate Life on the Internet in a Pandemic," A. Ukani, A. Mirian, A. Snoeren, Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2021.
    [Video]

Talks

  • "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)
  • "Third Eye: A Browser Extension Attack to Spy from Webcams and Microphones"
    • Harvard SpeakSEAS (April 2019)