I'm a PhD student advised by Micah Sherr at Georgetown University. Check out the Georgetown SecLab!
Previously I was a computer scientist in the formal methods section of the US Naval Research Laboratory. I worked a lot with Aaron Johnson, Rob Jansen, and Paul Syverson on network traffic analysis.
I research computer network privacy and security. Recently, I've been working on covert network communication protocols. I've also worked on topics including high-performance network simulation, secure statistics in distributed systems, and path selection in low-latency anonymity systems.
@inproceedings{wails:usenixsec:25,
title = {Censorship Evasion with Unidentified Protocol Generation},
author = {Ryan Wails and
Rob Jansen and
Aaron Johnson and
Micah Sherr},
eprint = {https://www.usenix.org/system/files/usenixsecurity25-wails.pdf},
booktitle = {2025 {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security '25)},
year = {2025},
}
@inproceedings{toney-wails:knowledge-nlp:25,
title = {Expertly Informed, Generatively Summarized: A Hybrid RAG Approach to Informed Consent Summarization with Auxiliary Expert Knowledge},
author = {Autumn Toney-Wails and
Ryan Wails and
Caleb Smith},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Knowledge-Augmented Methods for Natural Language Processing},
year = {2025},
publisher = {ACL},
}
@inproceedings{jansen:wpes:24,
title = {Repositioning Real-World Website Fingerprinting on Tor},
author = {Rob Jansen and
Ryan Wails and
Aaron Johnson},
doi = {10.1145/3689943.3695047},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society},
year = {2024},
publisher = {ACM},
}
@unpublished{jansen:arxiv:24,
title = {A Measurement of Genuine {Tor} Traces for
Realistic Website Fingerprinting},
author = {Rob Jansen and
Ryan Wails and
Aaron Johnson},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2008.03254},
howpublished = {arXiv preprint},
date = {2024-04-11},
}
@inproceedings{wails:ndss:24,
title = {On Precisely Detecting Censorship Circumvention in Real-World Networks},
author = {Ryan Wails and
George Arnold Sullivan and
Micah Sherr and
Rob Jansen},
doi = {10.14722/ndss.2024.23394},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium},
year = {2024},
publisher = {ISOC},
}
@article{jansen-explainable-popets23,
author = {Rob Jansen and
Ryan Wails},
title = {Data-Explainable Website Fingerprinting with Network Simulation},
journal = {Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies ({PoPETs})},
volume = {2023},
number = {4},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.56553/popets-2023-0125},
}
@inproceedings {wails-proteus-foci23,
author = {Ryan Wails and
Rob Jansen and
Aaron Johnson and
Micah Sherr},
title = {{Proteus}: Programmable Protocols for Censorship Circumvention},
booktitle = {2023 Free and Open Communications on the Internet},
year = {2023},
eprint = {//www.petsymposium.org/foci/2023/foci-2023-0013.pdf},
}
@inproceedings {jansen-netsim-atc22,
author = {Rob Jansen and
Jim Newsome and
Ryan Wails},
title = {Co-opting {Linux} Processes for High-Performance Network Simulation},
booktitle = {2022 {USENIX} Annual Technical Conference ({USENIX} {ATC} '22)},
year = {2022},
eprint = {//www.usenix.org/system/files/atc22-jansen.pdf},
}
@article{wails-behave-pets22,
author = {Ryan Wails and
Andrew Stange and
Eliana Troper and
Aylin Caliskan and
Roger Dingledine and
Rob Jansen and
Micah Sherr},
title = {Learning to Behave: Improving Covert Channel Security with Behavior-Based Designs},
journal = {Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies ({PoPETs})},
volume = {2022},
number = {3},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.56553/popets-2022-0068},
}
@inproceedings{rochet-claps-ccs20,
author = {Florentin Rochet and
Ryan Wails and
Aaron Johnson and
Prateek Mittal and
Olivier Pereira},
title = {{CLAPS}: Client-Location-Aware Path Selection in {Tor}},
booktitle = {2020 {ACM} {SIGSAC} Conference on Computer and Communications Security ({CCS} '20)},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.1145/3372297.3417279},
}
@inproceedings{wails-stormy-ccs19,
author = {Ryan Wails and
Aaron Johnson and
Daniel Starin and
Arkady Yerukhimovich and
S. Dov Gordon},
title = {Stormy: Statistics in {Tor} by Measuring Securely},
booktitle = {2019 {ACM} {SIGSAC} Conference on Computer and Communications Security ({CCS} '19)},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1145/3319535.3345650},
}
@article{wan-gpa-popets19,
author = {Gerry Wan and
Aaron Johnson and
Ryan Wails and
Sameer Wagh and
Prateek Mittal},
title = {Guard Placement Attacks on Path Selection Algorithms for {Tor}},
journal = {Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies ({PoPETs})},
volume = {2019},
number = {4},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.2478/popets-2019-0069},
}
@article{wails-tempest-popets18,
author = {Ryan Wails and
Yixin Sun and
Aaron Johnson and
Mung Chiang and
Prateek Mittal},
title = {Tempest: Temporal Dynamics in Anonymity Systems},
journal = {Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies ({PoPETs})},
volume = {2018},
number = {3},
year = {2018},
doi = {10.1515/popets-2018-0019},
}