Amjad is a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Muhammad Ali Gulzar from Virginia Tech and Dr. Zubair Shafiq from UC Davis. His research focuses on using software engineering techniques to tackle internet security and privacy challenges.
In today's digital landscape, third-party JavaScript plays a vital role in both tracking and enabling various functionalities on modern websites. However, existing content blocking approaches encounter significant hurdles when it comes to distinguishing between tracking and non-tracking resources originating from the same network location. These approaches heavily rely on manually curated filter lists, which impede scalability and lack the necessary contextual information to effectively detect tracking behavior. To tackle these challenges, Amjad's research focuses on the program analysis of JavaScript by employing advanced dynamic analysis and code refactoring techniques. Specifically, it involves capturing and analyzing the dynamic execution context, which includes essential details such as the call stack and calling context of each function within the JavaScript code. This enables to generate privacy-safe variant of the tracking JavaScript code. By doing so, Amjad's research aims to provide a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of tracking behavior, ultimately improving the efficacy of content blocking tools in modern web environments.
For more: CV [Last updated Feb'23]
