I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Washington State University. My research interests revolve around security and privacy. My objectives are to investigate the Web's threat landscape and develop countermeasures to protect user privacy. Lately, I've been focusing on investigating online tracking techniques and tackling pitfalls in authentication mechanisms. I received my PhD degree from the University of Illinois Chicago, advised by Jason Polakis, my MSc degree from Northeastern University, and my BSc degree from Xiamen University. I am also grateful for the collaboration and guidance of Fred Araujo and Teryl Taylor at IBM Research.

If you are interested in funded PhD opportunities, please send me an email with your resume.

News

Teaching

Publications

Fashion Faux Pas: Implicit Stylistic Fingerprints for Bypassing Browsers' Anti-Fingerprinting Defenses
Xu Lin, Frederico Araujo, Teryl Taylor, Jiyong Jang, and Jason Polakis
in Proceeding of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2023. (Acceptance rate: 17.0%) [news, slides]

Phish in Sheep's Clothing: Exploring the Authentication Pitfalls of Browser Fingerprinting
Xu Lin, Panagiotis Ilia, Saumya Solanki, and Jason Polakis
in Proceeding of USENIX Security Symposium (Security), 2022. (Acceptance rate: 17.2%=256/1492) [slides]

Fill in the Blanks: Empirical Analysis of the Privacy Threats of Browser Form Autofill
Xu Lin, Panagiotis Ilia, and Jason Polakis
in the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2020. (Acceptance rate: 16.9%=121/715) [pdf, project website] CSAW Applied Research Competition Finalist, 2021