As part of the Inforums and CyberExcellence seminars, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Ryan Wails (Georgetown University), who will speak to us about cybersecurity. You will find the abstract of his presentation and his biography below.

No registration required.

We hope to see many of you at this event!

On the Interplay of Modern Traffic Analysis and Internet Censorship & Circumvention Techniques
In this talk, I will review the current state of real-world Internet censorship and some tools that network users employ to circumvent censorship. Then, I’ll take a forward-looking view on how censors might incorporate modern ML-based traffic analysis techniques to block users, highlighting the need for stronger circumvention tools. Finally, I’ll discuss our new internet censorship evasion technique called Unidentified Protocol Generation (published at USENIX Security 2025), which is capable of evading detection by state-of-the-art traffic analysis.

Author bio: Ryan Wails is a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University studying network privacy and security. He completed his PhD while working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. This lab is known for originating the Tor network and establishing the PETs research community, which is now among the top international research communities in computer security. Ryan is a core contributor to the Tor project and has published in leading conferences on network simulators, privacy attacks, privacy-preserving measurements, path selection algorithms, censorship circumvention, and website fingerprinting. He has received several international distinctions, including Best Paper awards at top conferences and recognition at community events for his contributions.