I am recruiting new Ph.D. students! I have a few funded positions available. Please drop me an email with your CV if you’re interested in working with me.

I’m Zane, and I study network security and privacy. My research seeks to understand and build systems for authentication and trust on the internet. Current areas of focus include DNS, HTTPS/TLS server authentication, client authentication, and data authenticity. I also analyze the security threats related to emerging network technologies: 5G networks, IoT botnets, cryptocurrency/blockchain abuse, etc.

Select publications

Stale TLS Certificates: Investigating Precarious Third-Party Access to Valid TLS Keys
Zane Ma, Aaron Faulkenberry, Thomas Papastergiou, Zakir Durumeric, Michael D. Bailey, Angelos D. Keromytis, Fabian Monrose, Manos Antonakakis
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023
 [bib][slides]

Tracing Your Roots: Exploring the TLS Trust Anchor Ecosystem
Zane Ma, James Austgen, Joshua Mason, Zakir Durumeric, Michael Bailey
ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2021
 [bib][slides][video]

What’s in a Name? Exploring CA Certificate Control
Zane Ma, Joshua Mason, Manos Antonakakis, Zakir Durumeric, Michael Bailey
USENIX Security 2021
 [bib][slides][video]

Measuring Identity Confusion with Uniform Resource Locators
Joshua Reynolds, Deepak Kumar, Zane Ma, Rohan Subramanian, Meishan Wu, Martin Shelton, Joshua Mason, Emily Stark, Michael Bailey
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2020
 [bib]

The Impact of Secure Transport Protocols on Phishing Efficacy
Zane Ma, Joshua Reynolds, Joseph Dickinson, Kaishen Wang, Taylor Judd, Joseph D. Barnes, Joshua Mason, Michael Bailey
USENIX Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET) 2019
 [bib][slides]

Understanding the Mirai Botnet
Zane Ma, Manos Antonakakis, Tim April, Michael Bailey, Matt Bernhard, Elie Bursztein, Jaime Cochran, Zakir Durumeric, J. Alex Halderman, Luca Invernizzi, Michalis Kallitsis, Deepak Kumar, Chaz Lever, Joshua Mason, Damian Menscher, Chad Seaman, Nick Sullivan, Kurt Thomas, Yi Zhou
USENIX Security 2017
 [bib][slides][video]

The Security Impact of HTTPS Interception
Zakir Durumeric, Zane Ma, Drew Springall, Richard Barnes, Nick Sullivan, Elie Bursztein, Michael Bailey, J. Alex Halderman, Vern Paxson
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2017
 [bib]