2020 NortonLifeLock Fellowship Winners

We are thrilled to announce our winners for the 2020 NortonLifeLock (formerly Symantec) Fellowship: Julien Gamba, Sam Havron, and Xiaokuan Zhang! We were fortunate to have many talented students apply this year and would like to thank everyone who applied for doing so and giving us the opportunity to learn about their research. Meet our fellowship winners.

His research revolves around user's privacy in mobile devices and networks. In his work, Julien uses both static and dynamic analysis, as well as other techniques specifically designed to understand the behavior of mobile applications. Recently, Julien was the first author of the first large-scale analysis of the privacy and security risks of pre-installed software on Android devices and their supply chain. This study was featured in many newspaper with large circulation such as The Guardian (UK), the New York Times (USA), CDNet (USA) or El País (Spain). Julien was also awarded the ACM IMC Community Contribution Award in 2018 for his analysis of domain ranking services.

Sam is part of a research team studying computer security and privacy issues in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV), and he helps lead the first computer security clinic for IPV survivors, in NYC. His research has been published at top security conferences such as IEEE S&P and USENIX Security, and featured by media outlets including the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED.

Xiaokuan’s research interest lies in various areas of system security and privacy. In particular, he enjoys exploring attack surfaces and building systematic defenses to mitigate the attacks. His work not only resulted in publications in major security conferences but also had an impact in the industry. His NDSS 2019 paper applied differentially private mechanisms for defeating streaming traffic analysis, and showed that they were effective against ML attackers. His NDSS 2018 paper identified side channel leakages in iOS, which resulted in 3 CVEs issued by Apple. The proposed countermeasures were integrated in recent versions of iOS and MacOS. His other works on system security were also published in well-known security conferences, such as ACM CCS, USENIX Security, ACSAC and AsiaCCS.