Students & Lab
Nataliia Bielova and I are creating a new team at the Inria Centre at Universite Cote d’Azur.
I am currently looking for a PhD student (start date: anytime in 2027) and a Postdoctoral researcher (start date: anytime in 2027 or 2028).
Student Advising and Mentoring (current and past)
I left CISPA (Germany) at the end of November 2025 and joined Inria in December 2025. My PhD students and research assistant are still physically located at CISPA and Saarland University:
Ph.D. Students
Apr 2024–: Valentino Dalla Valle – Browser Extension Security (paper at ACM TWEB 2026 + papers under submission), Saarland University & CISPA
Dec 2023–: Dominic Troppmann – Type Checks (paper at IEEE/ACM ASE 2024 + under submission), co-supervised with Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Saarland University & CISPA
Research Assistants (HiWis)
Dec 2024–: Laith Alhelwane (MSc student) – Browser Extension Security, Saarland University
Alumni
2025–2026
- Huda Dawoud (she was a PhD student in my group at CISPA until I left in November 2025, now she is working with Sven Bugiel) – Browser Extension Analysis, Saarland University & CISPA
2024–2025
- Abdullah Hassan Chaudhry (MSc student) – Browser Extension Security (paper at MADWeb 2026), Saarland University
2023–2024
- Ben Rosenzweig (BSc thesis) – Machine Learning-Based Approach for Detecting Malicious Browser Extensions (paper at ACM TWEB 2026), Saarland University
2022–2023
- Sheryl Hsu (BSc student) – Browser Extension Security (paper at AsiaCCS 2024), Stanford University
- Manda Tran (MSc student, now Ph.D. student at UCLA) – Browser Extension Security (paper at AsiaCCS 2024), Stanford University
- Liz Izhikevich (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric, now Assistant Professor at UCLA) – Internet Scanning, (paper at ACM IMC 2023), Stanford University
2021–2023
Shubham Agarwal (Ph.D. student of Ben Stock) – Browser Extension Security (paper at ACM CCS 2024), Saarland University & CISPA
Kimberly Ruth (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric) – Web Browsing Behavior, (paper at ACM IMC 2022 + ACM CHI 2025), Stanford University
2022
- Mark Tran (BSc student) – Browser Extension Fingerprinting, Stanford University
- Vrushank Gunjur (BSc student) – Over-Privileged Extensions, Stanford University
- Nahum Maru (BSc student) – Browser Extension Crawler, Stanford University
- Fengchen (Maggie) Gong (MSc student, now Ph.D. student at Princeton) – Browser Fingerprinting, Stanford University
2021
- Liana Patel (Ph.D. student of Zakir Durumeric) – Web Crawler, Stanford University
- Luca Pistor & Nathan Bhak (BSc students) – Exam Software Security, Stanford University
- Paul Szymanski (BSc thesis) – A Study of State-of-the-Art Call Graph Creation Approaches for JavaScript, with Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Saarland University & CISPA
2020
- Anne Christin Deutschen & Luc Seyler (BSc students) – Browser Extension Vulnerability, with Doliere Francis Some, Saarland University & CISPA
2019–2020
- Marvin Moog & Markus Demmel (BSc students) – Analysis of JavaScript Obfuscation Techniques (paper at DSN 2021), Saarland University & CISPA
2019
- Maximilian Zoellner & Niklas Kempf (BSc students) – Intelligent Fuzzing System for JavaScript, Saarland University & CISPA
2018
- Nils Gloerfeld (BSc student) – Malicious JavaScript Deobfuscation, Saarland University & CISPA
- Dennis Salzmann (BSc student) – Malicious JavaScript Detection, Saarland University & CISPA