Hello,
I am Karthik Ramakrishnan, a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology currently being advised by Prof. Frank Li.
My research interests focus mainly on Web and mobile security, privacy and Internet measurement.
I am always up for collaborations, so if you want to discuss projects that I have worked on or a potential collaboration, the best way to get in touch with me is by e-mail.
Previously, I have worked on:
- Inconsistency in browser behavior related to security headers with Ben Stock at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security .
- Browser fingerprinting detection framework using Chrome DevTools Protocol with Prof. Juan Caballero and Dr. Srdjan Matic at the IMDEA Software Institute, Spain.
- Custom Deployable Production Honeypot with Visualisation Dashboard with Prof. Justin Pelletier and Prof. Bill Stackpole at the Global Cybersecurity Institute (GCI), RIT.
- ReconAID : Reconnaissance Automation Framework at the C3i Center, IIT Kanpur.
Experience
- January 2023—Present, Graduate Student Researcher @ Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA
- June 2023—August 2023, Research Intern @ CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarbrücken, Germany
- February 2022—July 2022, Research Intern (Bachelor Thesis) @ IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain
- May 2021—August 2021, Cybersecurity Visiting Researcher @ Global Cybersecurity Institute (Rochester Institute of Technology), Rochester, USA
- May 2021—July 2021, Research Intern (VAPT) @ C3i Center, IIT Kanpur, Kanpur, India
News
- July 2024: One paper accepted at IMC 2024.
- January 2024: One paper rejected at WWW 2024.
- September 2023: One paper rejected at NDSS 2024.
- August 2023: Finished my Summer research internship at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. More to follow
- February 2023: Received a Student Travel Grant to attend NDSS 2023
- January 2023: One paper rejected at MadWeb Workshop (NDSS 2023)
- August 2022: Started my masters at Georgia Tech
- July 2022: Finished my Bachelors Thesis internship at IMDEA Software Institute
Selected Publications
-
Head(er)s Up! Detecting Security Header Inconsistencies in Browsers. Under submission
Anonymous Authors
To be added soon -
Whatcha Lookin' At: Investigating Third-Party Web Content in Popular Android Apps. ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2024
Dhruv Kuchhal, Karthik Ramakrishnan, and Frank Li
paper
Over 65% of web traffic originates from mobile devices. However, much of this traffic is not from mobile web browsers but rather from mobile apps displaying web content. Android’s WebView has been a common way for apps to display web content, but it entails security and privacy concerns, especially for third-party content. Custom Tabs (CTs) are a more recent and recommended alternative. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study to examine if the top ∼146.5K Android apps use WebViews and CTs in a manner that aligns with user security and privacy considerations. Our measurements reveal that most apps still use WebViews, particularly to display ads, with only ∼20% using CTs. We also find that while some popular SDKs have migrated to CTs, others (e.g., financial services) benefiting from CT’s properties have not yet done so. Through semi-manual analysis of the top 1K apps, we uncover a handful of apps that use WebViews to show arbitrary web content within their app while modifying the web content behavior. Ultimately, our work seeks to improve our understanding of how mobile apps interact with third-party web content and shed light on real-world security and privacy implications.
More on my scholar profile.
Contact
You can also schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with me using the following link.