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Nguyen Phong Hoang

Assistant Professor

University of British Columbia

Thank you for visiting my homepage! I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of British Columbia. I am part of Systopia Lab and Security and Privacy Group where we work on Systems and Security research broadly.

My research interests are in the general areas of network security, online privacy, and Internet measurement. Specifically, by designing new systems and techniques to collect large-scale and longitudinal datasets, my research aims to improve the security of networked systems and reinforce the privacy of our online communications. Recently, this research goal has led me to focus on designing novel methods to (1) monitor Internet Freedom at scale by building systems for global and longitudinal measurements, and (2) evaluate and improve the effectiveness of domain name encryption protocols which have been proposed to enhance user privacy, e.g., DNS over HTTPS, and Encrypted Client Hello in TLS.

Prior to joining UBC, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Department of Computer Science at The University of Chicago, working with Professor Nick Feamster. I obtained my PhD from The State University of New York at Stony Brook under the supervision of Professor Michalis Polychronakis. With the support from the OTF’s Information Controls Fellowship during my PhD, I have also worked with several interdisciplinary groups, including The Citizen Lab at University of Toronto and the networking research group of Professor Phillipa Gill at The University of Massachusetts - Amherst.

While I have been writing and publishing research papers under the name Nguyen Phong Hoang (abbrv NP Hoang), my Vietnamese name is Hoàng Nguyên Phong {family name: Hoàng, given name: Nguyên Phong}. So for the ease of pronunciation, I often go by Phong or フォン if you speak 日本語 (I spent the best six years of my youth in Japan at 京都大学, JAIST, and 立命館 APU).


I am serving on the program committees of USENIX Security (‘24, ‘25), IMC (‘24, ‘25), PAM(‘24, ‘25), PETS (‘24’, ‘25), and FOCI 2024. Please consider submitting your work!

Publications

GFWeb: Measuring the Great Firewall's Web Censorship at Scale
Toward Automated DNS Tampering Detection Using Machine Learning
Automatic Generation of Web Censorship Probe Lists
Augmenting Rule-based DNS Censorship Detection at Scale with Machine Learning
How Great is the Great Firewall? Measuring China's DNS Censorship

I am very grateful to the following sponsors for supporting my research:

Disclaimer: Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in research outputs (published papers, talks, blog postings, etc.) are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

Land Acknowledgement: We respectfully acknowledge that the UBC Vancouver-Point Grey academic campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and UBC operations in Vancouver more generally are also on the territories of the Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh).