Ramakrishnan Sundara Raman

PhD candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan

OTF Senior ICFP Fellow in Information Controls at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto

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About Me

I am a fourth year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan Computer Science and Engineering department, where I am advised by Prof. Roya Ensafi. My primary research interests surround Internet Security and Privacy. In particular, I am interested in using Internet measurement methods to detect, analyze and prevent large-scale threats to Internet users' security and privacy.

My research involves measuring Internet censorship and network interference at global scale. I lead work on the Censored Planet Observatory, which is a platform for measuring various types of network interference continuously around the world. My work also involves understanding and analyzing the technologies that enable censorship and surveillance. Currently, I am an OTF Senior ICFP Fellow in Information Controls at The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto, working on identifying the network devices that perform network interference.

Publications

A Large-scale Investigation into Geodifferences in Mobile Apps Renuka Kumar, Apurva Virkud, Ram Sundara Raman, Atul Prakash, Roya Ensafi
USENIX Security Symposium, August 2022

A Multi-Perspective View of Internet Censorship in Myanmar Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Arturo Filastò, Maria Xynou, Ram Sundara Raman, Kennedy Middleton, Mingwei Zhang, Doug Madory, Molly Roberts, Alberto Dainotti
ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), August 2021

Lost in Transmission: Investigating Filtering of COVID-19 Websites Anjali Vyas, Ram Sundara Raman, Nick Ceccio, Philipp Lutscher, Roya Ensafi
Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), March 2021

Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory Ram Sundara Raman, Prerana Shenoy, Katharina Kohls, Roya Ensafi
ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2020

Investigating Large Scale HTTPS Interception in Kazakhstan Ram Sundara Raman, Leonid Evdokimov, Eric Wustrow, J. Alex Halderman, Roya Ensafi
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC), October 2020
Best Paper Award Nominee 🎉

Measuring the Deployment of Network Censorship Filters at Global Scale Ram Sundara Raman, Adrian Stoll, Jakub Dalek, Reethika Ramesh, Will Scott, Roya Ensafi
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2020

Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia Reethika Ramesh, Ram Sundara Raman, Matthew Bernhard, Victor Ongkowijaya, Leonid Evdokimov, Annie Edmundson, Steve Sprecher, Muhammad Ikram, Roya Ensafi
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), February 2020
CSAW'20 Applied Research Competition North America Top 10 Paper 🎉

Teaching

Fall 2020 Course: EECS 588 - Computer & Network Security
Position: Lead Graduate Student Instructor
In this virtual course, my responsibilities included assisting with designing the course, leading the course while the instructor was on maternity leave, managing the the course lecture and discussion, holding office hours for students, helping students with course projects, and grading.

News

18 November 2021 We uploaded a recorded version of our Censored Planet Community Webinar 2021

15 November 2021 I am very grateful to have been awarded the Open Technology Fund Information Controls Fellowship Award, and I am very excited to work with The Citizen Lab for the duration of my fellowship!

04 October 2021 We organized the Censored Planet Community Webinar 2021, where I talked about Censored Planet tools, data, and some of our new capabilities to analyze and explore data produced by the observatory.

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Service

I served as a session chair for the HTTPS censorship session at ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 21)

I served as a technical program committee member for ACM SIGCOMM 2021 Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 21)

I have been serving as the outreach chair for CSEG, the University of Michigan CSE department grad student organization since July 2020.

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Awards

15 November 2021 OTF Information Controls Fellowship Award

5 August 2021 GSI Honorable Mention Award

11 November 2020 2020 Michigan CSE Graduate Student Honors Competition Finalist

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Talks

4 October 2021 Title: Censored Planet Webinar: Censored Planet tools, data, and new capabilities
Venue: Censored Planet Community Webinar 2021

21 February 2021 Title: Censored Planet: An Internet-wide Longitudinal Observatory
Venue: 2021 NDSS DNS Privacy workshop

26 June 2020 Title: Censored Planet: Measuring Internet censorship remotely
Venue: OONI Internet Measurement Village

Blogposts

15 February 2021 Title: An analysis of a large-scale HTTPS interception
Venue: APNIC Blog

Projects

Censored Planet Observatory

I am the primary developer and maintainer of the Censored Planet Observatory, which is a platform for measuring Internet censorship and network interference continously and globally. The observatory uses thousands of remote infrastructural vantage points from over 170 countries to continuously monitor disruption tactics used by authorities around the world. All data collected using the Observatory is made public for use by researchers and policy-makers, and we have already released several reports based on data from the Observatory. I also maintain the Observatory website, which contains several visualizations of our data.

Map showing the Observatory's vantage point distribution:

Map showing percentage of disruption detected using Satellite in different countries:

Kazakhstan's HTTPS Interception

I led Censored Planet's investigation into the interception of HTTPS connections of Internet users in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan government began using a fake root CA from July 20 2019 to perform a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against HTTPS connections to websites including Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This behavior significantly weakened Internet for Kazakh Internet users, who were instructed to manually trust the fake CA certificate. Our investigation suggested that only a portion of the Internet users in Kazakhstan were affected in what appeared to be a pilot test of the system. Our live measurements reveal that the attack was stopped on August 6 2019, and an official statement from the Kazakhstan Government suggests they will turn on the system "when necessary".

Live tracking of Censored Planet observatory vantage points observing the intercepion:

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Contact Me

Ann Arbor, MI

Email: ramaks@umich.edu