Dongtao Liu

4th Year Ph.D. Student
Department of Computer Science
Duke University
LSRC D311, Research Dr.
Durham, NC 27708, USA

Email: dliu@cs.duke.edu
Tel: (919)660-6584

[Education]

[Research]

[Publications]

[Work]

[CV (as of 11/01/2011)]

[Miscellanea]

Education

2008.9 ~ Now Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, Duke University.

2005.8 ~ 2008.7 M.S. Degree in Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University.

2001.9 ~ 2005.7 B.S. Degree in Automation, Tsinghua University.

Research

My research interests include Mobile Computing, Cloud Computing, and Online Privacy. I am now focusing on privacy problems on Android smartphones.

My advisor is Dr. Landon P. Cox.

Projects:

Secure Software Keyboard on Touchscreen Mobile Devices (09/2011 - Present)

Passwords are highly sensitive data, however, the software keyboards in touch-screen mobile devices are vulnerable to screen spoofing attacks. ScreenPass tries to enforce the security of software keyboard and password entry through the combination of computer-vision techniques and taint tracking.

SocialLeaks: Monitor the Access to Your Friend List (01/2011 - 05/2011)

SocialLeaks is a Facebook application that helps you monitor who has access to your Facebook friendships. Even if you allow only your friends to view your friend list, many other people can view some of your connections through your friends' friend lists. SocialLeaks is designed to help us better understand this issue and to help you keep tabs on who can view your friendships.
Confidant: Protecting OSN Data without Locking it Up (12/2009 - 12/2010)

Online social networks (OSNs) are immensely popular, but their centralized control of user data raises important privacy concerns. Confidant provides a decentralized OSN framework which preserves user privacy while still enables scalable data processing. Confidant hooks the interface of Facebook in order to split data storage from it and leave it only for update notifications. Social relationships are exploited so that servers controlled by most trustworthy friends provide clear-text storage for the user's OSN data, which enables scalable data-processing framework. A light-weighted and free cloud service is introduced to help maintain data consistency and server availability. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant IIS-0916649.
Vis-à-Vis: Privacy-Preserving OSN via Virtual Individual Servers (08/2009 - 12/2009)

Vis-à-Vis is a decentralized framework for OSNs based on the privacy-preserving notion of a VIS. A VIS is a personal virtual machine running in a paid compute utility. In Vis-à-Vis, a person stores her data on her own VIS, which arbitrates access to that data by others. VISs self-organize into overlay networks corresponding to social groups. We focus on preserving the privacy of location information in this project while the distributed tree structure can be generalized to store other sensitive OSN data.

Full List

Publications

Confidant: Protecting OSN Data without Locking it Up [PDF] [TR]
Dongtao Liu, Amre Shakimov, Ramón Cáceres, Alexander Varshavsky, and Landon P. Cox
To Appear in 12th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2011)

Vis-à-Vis: Privacy-Preserving Online Social Networks via Virtual Individual Servers [PDF]
Amre Shakimov, Harold Lim, Ramón Cáceres, Landon P. Cox, Kevin Li, Dongtao Liu, and Alexander Varshavsky.
3rd International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2011)

Posters:

Two Sides of The Privacy Coin in Decentralized OSNs [PDF]
Amre Shakimov, Dongtao Liu, Ramón Cáceres, Alexander Varshavsky, and Landon P. Cox
OSDI Diversity 2010

Full List

Work

Software Engineer Intern, Google Inc, Mountain View, CA. (06/2011 - 08/2011)
Design and implement the next generation blacklist infrastructure in AdSpam Team (Ads Traffic Quality)