I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining CUHK, I was a Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. My research sits at the intersection of Security & Privacy and Systems & Networks, seeking to understand how network adversaries behave and to build practical defenses for an increasingly adversarial Internet. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and my B.A. from New York University.

My recent 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'm looking for motivated PhD students, RAs, and visiting scholars to work together. More details are on this page.

Selected Full Papers

Fingerprinting Deep Packet Inspection Devices by their Ambiguities
Diwen Xue, A. Huremagic, W. Wang, R. Sundara Raman, and R. Ensafi
In: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2025.

The Discriminative Power of Cross-layer RTTs in Fingerprinting Proxy Traffic
Diwen Xue, R. Stanley, P. Kumar, and R. Ensafi
In: Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium 2025.

TSPU: Russia’s Decentralized Censorship System
Diwen Xue, B.Mixon-Baca, ValdikSS, A. Ablove, B. Kujath, J. Crandall, and R. Ensafi
In: Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022.

CryptoFilter: Privacy-Preserving Traffic Analysis of Weak Transport Layer Encryption at Internet Gateways
B. Mixon-Baca, Diwen Xue, R. Ensafi and J. Crandall
In: Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES), 2025

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