Publications

2026

Bridges to Self: Silent Web-to-App Tracking on Mobile via Localhost

Tim Vlummens*, Aniketh Girish*, Nipuna Weerasekara, Gunes Acar, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
* Co-first authors
Proceedings of the 35th USENIX Security Symposium 2026
Informed browser localhost protections (adopted by Chrome, Firefox; DuckDuckGo, uBlock Origin, AdGuard); accelerated W3C LNA standardization; prompted Android 17 localhost permission; triggered regulatory engagement (CNIL, UK CMA, EC, EDPB) and U.S. congressional inquiry; cited in class actions (U.S., Canada, Germany); our team testified before Spanish Congress investigation into Meta and referenced in public statements by Spain's Prime Minister.
PDF Project

2025

Understanding Interconnected Abuse in Consumer Smart Device Ecosystems

Aniketh Girish

PhD dissertation.

PDF

Your Signal, Their Data: An Empirical Privacy Analysis of Wireless-scanning SDKs in Android

Aniketh Girish, Joel Reardon, Juan Tapiador, Srdjan Matic, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2025
PDF

The Effect of Platform Policies on App Privacy Compliance: A Study of Child-Directed Apps

Noura Alomar, Joel Reardon, Aniketh Girish, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Serge Egelman
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2025
PDF

2023

In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes

Aniketh Girish*, Tianrui Hu*, Vijay Prakash, Daniel J. Dubois, Srdjan Matic, Danny Yuxing Huang, Serge Egelman, Joel Reardon, Juan Tapiador, David Choffnes, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
* Co-first authors
Proceedings of the 23nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Montréal, Canada 2023
Prompted Android 16's new local network permission. Presented at CNIL Privacy Research Day 2024.
PDF

Mixed Signals: Analyzing Software Attribution Challenges in the Android Ecosystem

Kaspar Hageman, Álvaro Feal, Julien Gamba, Aniketh Girish, Jakob Bleier, Martina Lindorfer, Juan Tapiador, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 2023
PDF

2022

Challenges in inferring privacy properties of smart devices: Towards scalable multi-vantage point testing methods

Aniketh Girish, Vijay Prakash, Serge Egelman, Joel Reardon, Juan Tapiador, Danny Yuxing Huang, Srdjan Matic, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
Proceedings of the 3rd International CoNEXT Student Workshop in Rome, Italy, December 2022
PDF

Towards an extensible privacy analysis framework for Smart Homes

Aniketh Girish, Juan Tapiador, Srdjan Matic, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) in Nice, France, October 2022
PDF

ImposTer: Towards an Extensible Privacy Analysis framework for Smart home ecosystem

Aniketh Girish, Juan Tapiador, Srdjan Matic, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez
10th Traffic Monitoring and Analysis PhD School “Network Intelligence and Measurements" in Enschede, The Netherlands, June 2022
Best Poster Award

2021

ImposTer-Towards an extensible privacy analysis framework for Smart Home ecosystem.

Aniketh Girish

MsC dissertation.

PDF

2020

A Longitudinal and Comprehensive Study of the DANE Ecosystem in Email

Hyeonmin Lee, Aniketh Girish, Roland van Rijswijk-Deij, Taekyoung Kwon, Taejoong Chung
Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium in Boston, United States, August 2020
PDF Project

Empirical Analysis of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming over QUIC.

Aniketh Girish

My bachelor thesis. Not publicly available due to non-disclosure agreement.