Diwen Xue receives Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship

CSE PhD student Diwen Xue has been awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship will support his ongoing doctoral research, which focuses on measuring and enhancing the security, privacy, and availability of the internet.

Awarded to a select group of doctoral candidates at the University of Michigan each year, the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship recognizes students who have demonstrated outstanding research accomplishments and are pursuing dissertations that are exceptionally innovative and impactful. Fellows are selected in part based on the success of their work, including published papers or conference presentations, as well as excellence in teaching, mentorship, or other leadership positions.

Diwen’s research centers around a critical threat model with growing relevance in the digital age, namely, when the network itself becomes the adversary. Traditionally, network security focuses on end hosts and endpoints as the potential attackers, while treating the network itself as a neutral medium that simply transports packets. However, for billions of internet users—users subscribing to rogue ISPs, users relying on potentially malicious VPN providers, or users behind highly restrictive firewalls—the network is not neutral. Instead, it has become an active adversary that may interfere with traffic, tamper with protocols, surveil communications, or block or throttle connections. Under this adversarial model, the threat surface dramatically shifts. Instead of just worrying about compromised client machines or malicious servers, researchers need to model and mitigate threats originating from within the network infrastructure itself.

Diwen’s dissertation accomplishes this through three main thrusts: measuring and characterizing middleboxes and filtering devices, improving network traffic obfuscation schemes, and analyzing the ecosystem of tools that are designed to circumvent these interferences. His research has already led to significant advances in these areas, including large-scale internet measurement techniques that have provided unprecedented insights into Russia’s decentralized censorship system. His findings have not only contributed to the field’s understanding of how censorship technologies work but also shed much-needed light on their implications for internet security worldwide.

“Diwen’s research track record has established him as a rising star in the network security research community,” said Prof. Roya Ensafi, Diwen’s advisor. “He has built an exceptional record of academic excellence, real-world impact, and dedicated service.”

Diwen has published numerous papers in top-tier security conferences, such as the USENIX Security Symposium and NDSS, earning accolades such as the USENIX/Meta Internet Defense Prize and Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2022. In 2023, his innovative research also earned him first place in the 20th annual CSE Graduate Honors Competition. 

With the support of the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship, Diwen plans to further his research in network security, with the goal of measuring and modeling internet interference practices and developing principled, sustainable solutions for maintaining user privacy and access to information.