Ramakrishnan Sundara Raman

About Me

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I am currently a third year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan Computer Science and Engineering department, where I am advised by Prof. Roya Ensafi. I am a member of the Censored Planet Lab, where I work on improving security and privacy in the Internet. My current research involves measuring Internet censorship and network interference at global scale. My work also involves understanding and analyzing the technologies that enable censorship and surveillence. I lead work on the Censored Planet Observatory, which is a platform for measuring various types of network interference continously around the world.

Publications

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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) 2021, 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) 2020, November 2020

Investigating Large Scale HTTPS Interception in Kazakhstan Ram Sundara Raman, Leonid Evdokimov, Eric Wurstrow, 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

Teaching

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• 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

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• 10 April 2021 I led a series of outreach events (FEMMES Connect, FEMMES Explore) for CSEG in collaboration with FEMMES University of Michigan. The events involved designing and performing activities that helped middle-school aged students learn about computer algorithms and robots.

  

• 5 April 2021 We at Censored Planet are excited to announce the release of Satellite-v2, along with documentation, analysis helpers and other information which we hope will help the community understand Censored Planet data better.

• 21 February 2021 I was honoured to give an invited talk on Censored Planet at the 2021 NDSS DNS Privacy workshop.

See more news →

Service

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• I am serving 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.

• I served as the lead host for the Michigan CSE Security Reading Group (SECRIT) from June 2019 - June 2021

Invited Talks

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• 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

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

Projects

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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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