I am currently a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, working at the intersection of Security & Privacy and Systems & Networks. My research seeks to understand how network adversaries behave today and how they might evolve in the future, and to build practical methods to safeguard communications on an increasingly adversarial Internet. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and my B.A. at New York University.
My current research involves conducting large-scale empirical measurements to characterize emerging network threats (IMC’21, IMC’22, CCS’25), advancing traffic obfuscation to protect against sophisticated analysis (USENIX’22, USENIX’24, NDSS’25,FOCI’25), and systematically assessing privacy-enhancing technologies to identify and address vulnerabilities (NDSS’22, PETS’24, USENIX’24, PETS’25). More recently, I’m also interested in leveraging vantage points at Internet gateways (e.g., ISPs, IXPs) to facilitate security measurement at scale (WPES’25).
I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Department of Information Engineering, in Summer 2026. I'm looking for motivated PhD students, RAs, and visiting scholars to work together. More details are on this page.
The Internet Defense Prize
USENIX Security Distinguished Paper Award
Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship
Towner Prize for Academic Achievement
UofMichgan Honors Competition - First Place
CSAW Applied Research Competition
Selected Full Papers
Diwen Xue, A. Huremagic, W. Wang, R. Sundara Raman, and R. Ensafi
In: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025.
Diwen Xue, R. Stanley, P. Kumar, and R. Ensafi
In: Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025.
Diwen Xue, B.Mixon-Baca, ValdikSS, A. Ablove, B. Kujath, J. Crandall, and R. Ensafi
In: Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022.
B. Mixon-Baca, Diwen Xue, R. Ensafi and J. Crandall
In: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2025