Amjad is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Muhammad Ali Gulzar from Virginia Tech. He is also member of ProperData research group and Co-host at NothingToHide? podcast.

His research focuses on using program analysis techniques to solve internet security and privacy problems.

For more: CV [Last updated May'24]

For more: Thesis [Last updated Feb'24]

Author of 2024 Web Almanac JavaScript Chapter

Author of 2024 Web Almanac Privacy Chapter

News

• [Mar'25] Authored 2024 Web Almanac Javascript Chapter
• [Feb'25] Guest Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis
• [Dec'24] 2024 Web Almanac Privacy Chapter is now live!
• [Oct'24] Our work on web ads decreasing the accessibility of web pages is accepted to ICSE 2025
• [Oct'24] Attended Properdata Annual Symposium 2024
• [Sep'24] Our work on blocking tracking JS functions received the ACM CCS 2024 Distinguished Artifact Award
• [Sep'24] Received John Lee Pratt Graduate Fellowship
• [Aug'24] Our poster on enhancing the accessibility of digital advertisements accepted at CCS 2024
• [May'24] Our paper accepted at CCS 2024
• [May'24] Talk (Mitigating JavaScript Tracking Functions Using Chromium V8's Generated ASTs) accepted at IEEE S&P 2024
• [Apr'24] Co-author and Data Analyst for the JavaScript chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac

Open Source Bug Hunting with WebCheck

Selected Publications

• Accessibility Issues in Ad-Driven Web Applications

  Abdul Haddi Amjad, Muhammad Danish, Bless Jah, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

  IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2025




• Blocking Tracking JavaScript at the Function Granularity

  Abdul Haddi Amjad, Shaoor Munir, Zubair Shafiq, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2024

  ACM CCS 2024 Distinguished Artifact Award




• Blocking JavaScript without Breaking the Web: An Empirical Investigation

  Abdul Haddi Amjad, Zubair Shafiq, Muhammad Ali Gulzar

  Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2023




• TrackerSift: untangling mixed tracking and functional web resources

  Abdul Haddi Amjad, Danial Saleem, Zubair Shafiq , Muhammad Ali Gulzar

  Internet Measeurment Conference (IMC) 2021

Talks

Mitigating JavaScript Tracking Functions Using Chromium V8's Generated ASTs

IEEE SNP

San Francisco, 2024

Not publically available




Revolutionizing Privacy: Blocking Tracking JavaScript at the Function Granularity

Goole (Privacy sandbox team)

Remote, 2023

Not publically available




• Demystifying the Mystery of Privacy-Invasive JS Functions

  Ad-Filtering Developer Summit

  Amsterdam, 2023




• What's the next era of content blockers?

  Ad-Filtering Developer Summit

  Amsterdam, 2022




• How to disentangle tracking code from functional?

  Ad-Filtering Developer Summit

  Remote, 2021

Experience

• Brave

  Data Privacy Research Intern

  Summer 2023

  Worked on Solana NFT token-gating for Web3 brave-talk calls




• SEED Lab Virginia Tech

  Graduate Research Assistant

  August 2021 to Current




• Brave

  Ads and Privacy Research Engineer Intern

  Summer 2022

  Worked on testing E2E encryption for brave-talk calls




• Educative

  Educative Answers Technical Lead

  May 2018 to May 2021

Education

• Virginia Tech

  Ph.D Candidate

  August 2021 to Current




• FAST-NUCES

  Bachelor in Computer Science

  August 2017 to August 2021

Community Service

• Co-author and Data Analyst for the JavaScript chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac

  Member of the Artifacts Review Committee at PETS 2024

Grants

• Got travel grant for PoPETS 2023

  Got travel grant for IEEE S&P 2023