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]
Blocking JavaScript without Breaking the Web: An Empirical Investigation
Abdul Haddi Amjad, Muhammad Ali Gulzar, Zubair Shafiq
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2023
TrackerSift: untangling mixed tracking and functional web resources
Abdul Haddi Amjad, Danial Saleem, Muhammad Ali Gulzar, Zubair Shafiq
Internet Measeurment Conference (IMC) 2021
What's the next era of content blockers?
Ad-Filtering Developer Summit
Amsterdam, 2022
How to disentangle tracking code from functional?
Ad-Filtering Developer Summit
Remote, 2021
Data Privacy Research Intern
Summer 2023
Worked on Solana NFT token-gating for Web3 brave-talk calls
Graduate Research Assistant
August 2021 to Current
Ads and Privacy Research Engineer Intern
Summer 2022
Worked on testing E2E encryption for brave-talk calls
Educative Answers Technical Lead
May 2018 to May 2021
Ph.D Student
August 2021 to Current
Bachelor in Computer Science
August 2017 to August 2021