Xu Lin

“Walking to where the water ends, I sit and watch the clouds rise.”
Wang Wei, My Retreat at Mount Zhongnan

I am drawn to the seams of the web, where intention and exposure quietly diverge. My research traces the implicit signals by which browsers identify, track, and authenticate users, and the cat-and-mouse between defenses and techniques that bypass them, toward a web where what is revealed is only what was meant.

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University.

xu.lin@wsu.edu · Google Scholar

Dispatches

03 / 2026Paper on Instability of Browser Fingerprinting accepted by IMC 2026.

view earlier dispatches

06 / 2023Your web browsing habits may be less private than you think, by Kim Martineau at IBM Blog.
02 / 2023Joining Washington State University as an assistant professor.
12 / 2022Paper on browser stylistic fingerprinting accepted by S&P 2023.
09 / 2022Invited speaker for Antifraud / Web Payments at W3C’s 2022 Annual Conference.
08 / 2022Awarded by Brave for finding a security bug in the Brave browser.
05 / 2022Research internship at IBM Research.
02 / 2022Paper on two-factor authentication accepted by USENIX Security 2022.
10 / 2021Paper on form autofill entered the finalist of the CSAW’21 Applied Research Competition.
05 / 2021Awarded by Google for finding a security bug in Chrome (CVE-2021-21181).
05 / 2021Research internship at IBM Research.
07 / 2020Paper on browser form autofill accepted by CCS 2020.
06 / 2020Awarded by Google for finding a security bug in Chrome (CVE-2020-6521).
08 / 2018Started PhD program at the University of Illinois Chicago.
03 / 2018Accepted a fully funded PhD offer from the University of Illinois Chicago.