Hi there!

It's Talha. I live in Boston and am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. I'm advised by David Choffnes, and my research interests revolve around network security, software security and internet measurement. Previously, I was an undergraduate student at National University of Sciences & Technology in Islamabad.

More specifically, my research explores security issues related to the implementation and deployment of the TLS protocol. My approach to research is to build novel network measurement techniques, and to shed light on unexplored aspects of protocol use that may impact security.

In the past, my work has uncovered issues with TLS adoption on the web (e.g., content differences), in mobile devices (e.g., inconsistent certificate pinning policies), and, in IoT devices (e.g., stale CA root stores). More recently, my focus has shifted to finding new techniques for efficiently fuzzing TLS libraries.

Publications

Behind the Scenes: Uncovering TLS and Server Certificate Practice of IoT Device Vendors in the Wild
Hongying Dong, Hao Shu, Vijay Prakash, Yizhe Zhang, Talha Paracha, David Choffnes, Santiago Torres-Arias, Danny Huang, Yixin Sun
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023

A Comparative Analysis of Certificate Pinning in Android & iOS
Amogh Pradeep*, Talha Paracha*, Protick Bhowmick, Ali Davanian, Abbas Razaghpanah, Taejoong Chung, Martina Lindorfer, Narseo Vallina, Dave Levin, David Choffnes
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022
*Equal contribution.
[PDF]

Respect the ORIGIN! A Best-case Evaluation of Connection Coalescing in The Wild
Sudheesh Singanamalla, Talha Paracha, Suleman Ahmad, Jonathan Hoyland, Luke Valenta, Yevgen Safronov, Peter Wu, Andrew Galloni, Kurtis Heimerl, Nick Sullivan, Christopher Wood, Marwan Fayed
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2022
[PDF]

IoTLS: Understanding TLS Usage in Consumer IoT Devices
Talha Paracha, Daniel Dubois, Narseo Vallina, David Choffnes
Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2021
[PDF]

Blocking without Breaking: Identification and Mitigation of Non-Essential IoT Traffic
Anna Maria, Daniel Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Talha Paracha, Hamed Haddadi, David Choffnes
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2021
[PDF]

A Deeper Look at Web Content Availability and Consistency over HTTP/S
Talha Paracha, Balakrishnan Chandrasekaran, David Choffnes, Dave Levin
Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA) 2020
[PDF]

When Speakers Are All Ears: Characterizing Misactivations of IoT Smart Speakers
Daniel Dubois, Roman Kolcun, Anna Maria, Talha Paracha, David Choffnes, Hamed Haddadi
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2020
[PDF]