About Me
I am a 3rd Year Ph.D. student in Computer Science Department at University of California, Davis. I am advised by Professor Zubair Shafiq. I am also part of the ProperData Research Group.
I completed my Bachelors of Technology in Computer Science from The LNM Institute of Information Technology, India in 2020. My undergraduate advisor was Professor Sakthi Balan. I was also briefly co-advised by Dr. Nicolas Kourtellis and Professor Nishanth Sastry.
Broadly, my research interests include Security, Privacy and Applied Machine Learning. My focus is towards making our web more secure and private with the use of ML-based techniques. I carry out web-based large-scale Internet measurements to study and improve the dynamics of web. Specifically, my current research is focused at studying and improving security, transparency, and privacy issues in the online advertising ecosystem.
Updates
- Jul 17th, 2024 : Invited for a talk on “Uncovering hidden security and privacy threats in online advertising” at UCL.
- Jul 17th, 2024 : Presented poster for my research on “Tracking Pixels” at Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2024.
- May 21st, 2024 : Presented my research of ad-fraud “dark pooling” at IEEE S&P (“Oakland”).
- Mar 13th, 2024 : Received “GGCS PhD Fellowship 2024” ($10K)
- Mar 1st, 2024 : Chairing the session on “Program Language Security on the Web” at [MADWeb 2024].(https://madweb.work/program24/) in San Diego.
- Jan 1st, 2024 : Serving on PC of ACM CCS 2024. Consider submitting your research.
- Nov 8th, 2023 : Serving on PC of MADWeb 2024. Consider submitting your research.
- Sep 28th, 2023 : My research on “Large-scale Audit of Compliance of Twitter’s Advertising Policies” featured in FastCompany (Preprint).
- Sep 18th, 2023 : Attended 3rd ProperData Symposium 2023 at Northeastern University.
- Jul 10th, 2023 : My paper accepted to IEEE S&P (“Oakland”) 2024.
- May 16th, 2023 : Started summer school at Cybersecurity Summer Institute (CSI, GeorgiaTech)
- May 16th, 2023 : Gave a talk: “Be Aware: Dark Pooling Uncovered” at advertising industry conference: AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O at MGM Las Vegas.
- Mar 10th, 2023 : Attended day event on Responsible Innovation: Intersection of Privacy and Artificial Intelligence at CeDAR, UC Davis.
- Mar 3rd, 2023 : Selected as a Mentor for E-PRIME Mentorship Program at UC Davis.
- Feb 23rd, 2023 : Selected as a Cybersecurity Summer Fellow at Georgia Tech University (CSI).
- Oct 5th, 2022 : Attended Ad-Filtering Dev Summit 2022.
- Jun 14th, 2022 : Started my Summer Internship at Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF), Germany under Prof. Savvas Zannettou.
- Nov 3rd, 2021 : Attended 1st ProperData Symposium 2021 at UC Irvine.
- Sep 22nd, 2021 : Started my Ph.D. at UC Davis.
Selected Publications
Turning the Tide on Dark Pools? Towards Multi-Stakeholder Vulnerability Notifications in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Yash Vekaria, Rishab Nithyanand, Zubair Shafiq
Under Submission
[PDF]
The Inventory is Dark and Full of Misinformation: Understanding the Abuse of Ad Inventory Pooling in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Yash Vekaria, Rishab Nithyanand, Zubair Shafiq
Accepted at IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (Oakland), 2024
[PDF] [Video] [Code] [Dataset]
Auditing the Compliance and Enforcement of Twitter’s Advertising Policies
Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Savvas Zannettou
Under Submission
[PDF]