Umar Iqbal

I am a third year PhD student at the Internet Research Lab at University of Iowa . My advisor is Prof. Zubair Shafiq . I conduct research on web security and privacy with an emphasis on privacy enhancing technologies. Joined Brave Software as a summer research intern. Presented poster on anti-adblocking at the Midwest Security Workshop 2018. Presen... ted our work on anti-adblocking at IMC 2017. Our work on adblocking got accepted at IMC 2017. Attended IEEE CNS 2016 in Philadelphia. Had a good learning experience. Started my PhD at University of Iowa. Attended USENIX Security conference, and got to hear some interesting ideas. Published my first paper on malware propogation [ Malware Slums ] in IEEE/IFIP DSN 2016. Left research assistantship at Lahore University of Management Sciences. My current research focuses on improving the effectiveness of adblocking and tracker-blocking technologies. Online advertisements have become an attractive target for various type of abuses, such as online tracking. Adblockers serve as a tool to protect user privacy by blocking these advertisements. Adblockers rely on filter lists to block advertisements. However, filter lists suffer from two major problems. First, they are manually curated with informal crowdsourced feedback and thus lack precision and accuracy. Second, manual curation adds an update overhead and make filter lists susceptible to evasion attacks. In my research, I address these challenges using machine learning approaches. Salman Yousaf, Umar Iqbal, Shehroze Farooqi, Raza Ahmad, Zubair Shafiq, Fareed Zaffar 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), France, 2016. Umar Iqbal, Zubair Shafiq, Zhiyun Qian Midwest Security Workshop, Urbana Champaign , 2018. As an intern at Brave . I instrumented Chromium web browser to capture the rendering of a webpage. Specifically, I instrumented element creation, modification, removal, script execution, script compilation, and network requests initiation. The instrumentation provides ...Read More