João Afonso Vilalonga, CMU Portugal Affiliated Ph.D. student in the area of Computer Science at NOVA School of Science and Technology (NOVA FCT) and researcher at NOVA LINCS received the “Rising Star Research” 2025 Award by the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) community.
This award recognizes innovative work in the field of internet freedom by acknowledging and highlighting the scientific efforts of researchers who are significantly contributing to the advancement of the field. The distinction was awarded in recognition of his novel research on privacy protection and Internet censorship circumvention.
The award-winning research focused on novel techniques and foundational approaches to advancing network privacy and anonymity. The research developed innovative strategies based on traffic encapsulation, enabling Internet users to communicate or access information without exposing the content they retrieve.
By covertly embedding user traffic within common protocols, such as those used by popular Internet services and cloud providers, the visible traffic appears normal, while the underlying communication remains unobservable, even against advanced large-scale traffic analysis attacks. These methods are particularly valuable in censored or tightly controlled networks and also serve as testbeds for developing new defenses against sophisticated techniques, including deep packet inspection and AI-based traffic analysis.
This research was conducted under the supervision of Pofessors Henrique Domingos (NOVA LINCS, NOVA School of Science and Technology), João S. Resende (Universidade do Porto), and Osman Yağan (CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, Carnegie Mellon University).
“Under the scope of the CMU Portugal program, we are also currently assessing network robustness against active targeted attacks and node failures, both accidental and malicious, to design novel solutions that strengthen the security, resilience, and privacy-preservation for computer systems and networks”, shared João and his supervisor, Henrique Domingos.
More information about the award here.