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Pouneh Nikkhah Bahrami

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis. I work under the direction of my advisor Prof. Zubair Shafiq.
My research focuses on emerging online tracking techniques, specifically browser fingerprinting, by combining machine learning and web measurement approaches. I specialize in the analysis of JavaScript, both statically and dynamically, to identify potential security and privacy threats. My primary application of these skills has been in instrumenting web browsers to collect data for static or dynamic threat detection. I have applied these skills in real-world settings through internships at major browsers including Apple (the WebKit Security & Privacy) , Google (the Privacy Sandbox team), and Brave Browser , where I gained hands-on experience in tackling security and privacy challenges.

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News

10/2025 Served as a PC member at ACM WWW 2026.
09/2025 Our paper "CookieGuard: Characterizing and Isolating the First-Party Cookie Jar" got accepted at ACM IMC 2025.
08/2025 Our paper "Byte by Byte: Unmasking Browser Fingerprinting at the Function Level" got accepted at CCS 2025.
07/2025 started as a full-time software engineer at Webkit, Apple.
06/2025 Passed my qualifying exam and advanced to PhD candidacy.
06/2024 Started my internship at Apple's WebKit Security and Privacy team

Old News

10/2023 Presented "Tracking, Profiling. and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem" at IMC 2023, Montreal, CA.
10/2023 "Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem" won the best paper award!
10/2023 Started my Internship at Privacy Sandbox team of Google Chrome.
09/2023 Attended ProperData 3rd Annual Symposium in Boston, Massachusetts.
08/2023 Invited talk at Google (Presented "Unveiling the Sercrets of Online Privacy").
07/2023 Serving as the publication chair of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2024).
07/2023 Received travel grant to attend PETS 2023 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
07/2023 Started my Summer internship at Ennetix.
06/2023 Received travel grant to attend ACM SIGMETRICS 2023 in Orlando, Florida.
04/2023 Received grant to attend the 2023 Cybersecurity Summer Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
11/2022 Received travel grant to attend ACM CCS 2022 in Los Angeles.
08/2022 Attended the USENIX security '22 in Boston.
07/2022 Presented FP-Radar in PETS '22 (video).
06/2022 Started my Summer internship at Brave Software.
05/2022 Received travel grant to attend IEEE S&P Oakland.
01/2022 Invited talk at Spirals, France.
12/2021 Invited talk at Brave Software.
11/2021 Invited talk at Oracle Labs, Brisbane, Australia.
11/2021 Attended the ProperData Symposium at UCI.
11/2021 "FP-Radar: Longitudinal Measurement and Early Detection of Browser Fingerprinting" was accepted at PETS 2022.
10/2021 Invited talk at Ad Blocker Dev Summit (video).
06/2020 Joined Gunrock Breakerspace Lab.