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Elham Pourabbas Vafa

dblp:387/9042 · DBLP profile ↗
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2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Network and information security
2 papers
Network security · 38% Malware analysis · 38% Privacy and data protection · 12%

Topics — the 3 heaviest of 4, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Network security › anonymity networks
censorship circumvention
0.912025
Learning from Censored Experiences: Social Media Discussions around Censorship Circumvention Technologies · SP 2025
Privacy and data protection › privacy management
privacy practices
0.312025
Learning from Censored Experiences: Social Media Discussions around Censorship Circumvention Technologies · SP 2025
Digital forensics and information hiding
underground forum analysis
0.312025
DarkGram: A Large-Scale Analysis of Cybercriminal Activity Channels on Telegram · USENIX Security Symposium 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

social media data analysis · 0.9mixed-method analysis · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Learning from Censored Experiences: Social Media Discussions around Censorship Circumvention Technologies
abstract
During periods of strict internet censorship, maintaining access to online information and communication becomes paramount. However, users must often navigate complicated pathways to find effective censorship circumvention technologies (CCTs). Utilizing real-time data from over 50M posts collected from Twitter and Telegram from September 18th, 2022, to January 31st, 2023, during a peak period of censorship, we examined the impact of CCTs, such as VPNs, proxies, and alternative connectivity solutions, on digital rights, privacy, and internet governance. Through a mixed-method analysis, our findings reveal user resilience and adaptability when the community collaboratively shares and discusses knowledge and resources. First, we developed a codebook for discussions considering English and, for the first time, Persian posts, highlighting the main problems users encounter when attempting to bypass the internet restrictions. Several concerns were common across these discourses, such as traceability, identifiability, and accidental use of malicious configurations. Our temporal study, conducted over 20 weeks, showed shifts in VPN preferences due to changing censorship strategies, with the inclusion of more privacy-focused and accessibility features leading to higher adoption. We also found several dedicated popular VPN channels that shared malicious files masked as free VPN services.
Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Mohit Singhal, Poojitha Thota, Sayak Saha Roy
SP1
2025 DarkGram: A Large-Scale Analysis of Cybercriminal Activity Channels on Telegram
Sayak Saha Roy, Elham Pourabbas Vafa, Kobra Khanmohamaddi, Shirin Nilizadeh
USENIX Security Symposium2