Amir Houmansadr

Amir Houmansadr Associate Professor
College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Office: 206 CS Building
E-mail: amir (at) cs.umass.edu [Public Key]
Online: Twitter, LinkedIn

Bio: I am an Associate Professor in computer science at UMass Amherst, where I joined in Fall'14 (tenured since Fall'19). I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 and I was a postdoctoral scholar for two years at the University of Texas at Austin. Earlier, I received my M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees from Sharif University of Technology. Research Area: My general area of research is network/AI security and privacy, and I am in particular actively investigating privacy-enhancing technologies and trustworthy AI. To that end, I design and deploy censorship circumvention systems, analyze network protocols and services (e.g., messaging apps and machine learning APIs) for privacy leakage, perform theoretical analysis to derive bounds on privacy (e.g., using game theory and information theory), and evaluate the security and privacy of emerging AI technologies.

Selected Awards

- DARPA Director's Award, 2024
- COLM Spotlight Paper, 2024
- Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP), 2024
- ACM CCS Distinguished Paper Award, 2023
- First place at CSAW Applied Research Competition, 2023
- Best Practical Paper Award of the FOCI Community, 2023
- DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), 2022
- ACM IMC Best Paper Award Runner-Up, 2020
- CSAW Applied Research Competition Finalist, 2019
- NSF CAREER Award, 2016
- Google Faculty Research Award, 2015
- IEEE S&P Best Practical Paper Award, 2013

News!

- 02/28/2025: I gave a keynote at IMPACT!
- 01/27/2025: Interview with MassLive on Internet freedom!
- 01/22/2025: I was on The Fabulous 413!
- 01/06/2025: Article covering our DARPA Director's Award!
- 12/01/2024: CensorLab, our censorship emulation testbed, is online!
- 10/05/2024: Interviewed by WBZ NewsRadio 1030 on online safety.
- 10/01/2024: Our COLM paper on LLM Prompt reproduction is selected as a Spotlight!
- 02/21/2024: Interviewed by MassLive on Russian WiFi malware.
- 01/12/2024: Our USENIX Security paper won a 2024 Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP).
- 11/29/2023: Our CCS'23 paper received a Distinguished Paper Award!
- 11/11/2023: Our USENIX Security paper won the first place at CSAW 2023 Applied Research Competition.
- 07/10/2023: Our upcomming USENIX Security paper received the 2023 Best Practical Paper Award from the FOCI Community.
- 05/05/2023: Gave the Keynote Talk at ICLR BANDS 2023 Workshop.
- 04/01/2023: Served on a panel at Shasha Seminar for Human Concerns.
- 10/05/2022: Tech Crunch covers GFW Report's findings about TLS censorship.
- 08/11/2022: Received a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA).
- 07/29/2021: Two finalist proposals for Facebook Privacy-Enhancing Technologies.
- 12/10/2020: Check out my invited blog post on the use of ML for censorship circumvention.
- 10/27/2020: Best Paper Award Runner-up at ACM IMC'20.
- 09/01/2020: Interview with The Wire China on the recent developments of censorship techniques.
- 08/08/2020: ZDNet article on our collaborative study of ESNI censorship.
- 01/23/2020: Three papers accepted at NDSS'20!
- 11/01/2019: DeepCorr is a finalist at the CSAW’19 Applied Research Competition!
- 09/01/2019: Promoted to associate professor with tenure!
- 07/24/2018: Two papers accepted at ACM CCS'18!
- 05/30/2018: I had a TV interview on Net Neutrality!

[+] Older News ...

- 08/22/2017: Received a collaborative NSF Award to investigate IoT Privacy!
- 08/02/2017: 2/2 papers accepted at ACM CCS'17! Congrats to my students Hadi and Milad!
- 05/15/2017: Received a collaborative NSF/Intel Award to investigate future network architectures!
- 04/07/2017: I spoke at a panel at the Obfuscation Workshop at the NYU.
- 12/09/2016: I moderated a panel on Internet censorship at ACSAC 2016.
- 11/09/2016: I gave a keynote talk on Internet censorship at SBSeg 2016 in Niteroi, Brazil.
- 07/25/2016: Received a collaborative Medium NSF Award to investigate Covert Communications! Many thanks to the NSF!
- 07/23/2016: 2/2 papers accepted at CCS'16! Congrats to my students, Hadi and Milad!
- 02/25/2016: Our Book on Information Hiding is published!
- 01/27/2016: I received an NSF CAREER Award!
- 12/16/2015: I will co-chair the 2016 USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI)!
- 11/20/2015: Our CacheBrowser featured in MIT Technology Review article
- 07/24/2015: Received an NSF Award to investigate statistical traffic analysis. Many thanks to the NSF!
- 02/12/2015: I am awarded a Faculty Research Award from Google. Thanks Google for the generosity!
- 05/16/2014: I am thrilled to be joining Computer Science at UMass Amherst as an Assistant Professor in the Fall.
- 11/25/2013: Paper accepted at NDSS 2014: "No Direction Home: The True Cost of Routing Around Decoys."
- 05/21/2013: Our paper won the Best Practical Paper award at the IEEE S&P 2013.
- 01/28/2013: Paper accepted at the IEEE S&P 2013: "The Parrot is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications."
- 10/20/2012: Paper accepted at the NDSS 2013: "I want my voice to be heard: IP over Voice-over-IP for unobservable censorship circumvention."
- 10/20/2012: Paper accepted at the NDSS 2013: "I want my voice to be heard: IP over Voice-over-IP for unobservable censorship circumvention."
- 07/09/2012: I have joined the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoc.
- 04/04/2012: Received the ECE Computer Engineering Fellowship for research excellence in the area of computer engineering.
- 09/01/2011: I was featured in our department’s website and the CSL’s website.
- 07/21/2011: We were interviewed by the New Scientist about our Stegobot research.
- 07/15/2011: Our paper Cirripede is accepted to the ACM CCS 2011
[-] Older News ...

Service

Technical Program Committees:

IEEE S&P 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2025, 2026
ACM IMC 2024
ACM CCS 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024
USENIX FOCI 2015, 2016 (co-chair), 2017, 2020, 2024, 2025
PETS 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023
NDSS 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2026
USENIX Security 2021
ACSAC 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022

Leadership Roles:

Associate Chair: NDSS 2026
Associate Chair: IEEE S&P 2025, 2026
Associate Editor: IEEE TDSC (2021-2025)
Advisory Council: Open Technology Fund
Advisory Board: FOCI (2022-now)
Steering Committee: NESD (2016-now)
Co-Chair: NESD 2016, 2019; NDSS Posters 2017; USENIX FOCI 2016; IWCC 2014

[+] Past service ...

Courses

Fall'24: Advanced Information Assurance (CMPSCI 660)

[+] Previous courses ...