Amjad is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Muhammad Ali Gulzar from Virginia Tech and Dr. Zubair Shafiq from UC Davis. He is also member of ProperData research group and Co-host at NothingToHide? podcast.

His research focuses on using program analysis techniques to solve internet security and privacy problems.

For more: CV [Last updated Apr'25]

For more: Thesis [Last updated Feb'24]

Actively seeking postdoctoral opportunities

News

[Apr'25] Organizing committee member for the 2025 Workshop on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET-VA)
[Apr'25] Our poster won the People's Choice Award at the CCI poster session
[Mar'25] Co-Authored 2024 Web Almanac Javascript Chapter
[Feb'25] Guest Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis
[Dec'24] 2024 Web Almanac Privacy Chapter is now live!
[Oct'24] Our work on web ads decreasing the accessibility of web pages is accepted to ICSE 2025
[Oct'24] Attended Properdata Annual Symposium 2024
[Sep'24] Our work on blocking tracking JS functions received the ACM CCS 2024 Distinguished Artifact Award
[Sep'24] Received John Lee Pratt Graduate Fellowship
[Aug'24] Our poster on enhancing the accessibility of digital advertisements accepted at CCS 2024
[May'24] Our paper accepted at CCS 2024
[May'24] Talk (Mitigating JavaScript Tracking Functions Using Chromium V8's Generated ASTs) accepted at IEEE S&P 2024

Research Outreach

Privacy Violation Reporting

We have reported the following issues to the EasyList and EasyPrivacy authors on GitHub:
- 1. Issue #18244
- 2. Issue #18243
- 3. Issue #18242
- 4. Issue #18230
- 5. Issue #18185

How Accurately Do Large Language Models Understand Code?

Sabaat Haroon, Ahmad Faraz Khan, Ahmad Humayun, Waris Gill, Abdul Haddi Amjad, Ali R.Butt, Mohammad Taha Khan, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2026

Currently under submission

Accessibility Issues in Ad-Driven Web Applications

Abdul Haddi Amjad, Muhammad Danish, Bless Jah, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2025

Blocking Tracking JavaScript at the Function Granularity

Abdul Haddi Amjad, Shaoor Munir, Zubair Shafiq, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2024

ACM CCS 2024 Distinguished Artifact Award

Blocking JavaScript without Breaking the Web: An Empirical Investigation

Abdul Haddi Amjad, Zubair Shafiq, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2023

TrackerSift: untangling mixed tracking and functional web resources

Abdul Haddi Amjad, Danial Saleem, Zubair Shafiq , Muhammad Ali Gulzar

Internet Measeurment Conference (IMC) 2021

SEED Lab Virginia Tech • Graduate Research Assistant • Aug 2021 – Present
Amazon • Applied Scientist Intern • Summer 2025

Collaborated with the Special Projects Investigation Team to gather and analyze external intelligence for identifying bad actors on the Amazon marketplace.
Brave • Data Privacy Research Intern • Summer 2023

Worked on Solana NFT token-gating for Web3 brave-talk calls
Brave • Ads and Privacy Research Engineer Intern • Summer 2022

Worked on testing E2E encryption for brave-talk calls
Educative • Educative Answers Technical Lead • May 2018 – May 2021

1.Guest Lecture: Delivered a guest lecture at Washington University in St. Louis for the Data-Driven Privacy and Security course.
2.Undergraduate Mentorship: Mentored a student under the Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED) funding.
- - Won the Best Poster Award on one of our works
- - Co-author with me on two of our works
3.CS 5774: User Interface Software — Graduate Teaching Assistant (Virginia Tech Fall 2022 – 2023)

2025 Winner, CCI People’s Choice Award for our poster
2024 Winner, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Distinguished Artifact Award