Ethan Witwer

PhD student

I'm a computer science PhD student with a strong interest in developing secure systems with practical use cases. My PhD project is to make practical defenses against traffic analysis, which can be used to find out what you're doing on the Internet.

About Me

I'm a computer science PhD student, partially financed by CUGS research school and Karlstad Internet Privacy Lab. I'm also an affiliated PhD student at Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program. My supervisors are Niklas Carlsson and Tobias Pulls.

My PhD project is to make defenses against traffic analysis, which can be used to identify the websites you visit over a VPN or Tor, which videos you watch online, and more. The goal is to contribute to better security and privacy for everyone on the Internet.

See my personal website if you'd like to know more about me and my research.

Publications

2026

Somiya Kapoor, David Hasselquist, Ethan Witwer, Mikael Asplund, Niklas Carlsson (2026)

QoE Prediction of Encrypted Video Traffic forInteractive and Impatient Streaming Users (Conference paper)

2025

Somiya Kapoor, Ethan Witwer, David Hasselquist, Mikael Asplund, Niklas Carlsson (2025)

Predicting Video QoE from Encrypted Traffic: Leveraging Video Fingerprinting and Providing System-Level Insights (Conference paper)

2024

August Carlson, David Hasselquist, Ethan Witwer, Niklas Johansson, Niklas Carlsson (2024)

Understanding and Improving Video Fingerprinting Attack Accuracy under Challenging Conditions PROCEEDINGS OF THE 23RD WORKSHOP ON PRIVACY IN THE ELECTRONIC SOCIETY, WPES 2024, p. 141-154 (Conference paper)

https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3689943.3695045

David Hasselquist, Ethan Witwer, August Carlson, Niklas Johansson, Niklas Carlsson (2024)

Raising the Bar: Improved Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses for Video Streaming Traffic Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, p. 167-184 (Conference paper)

https://dx.doi.org/10.56553/popets-2024-0112

Research

Teacher and students with laptops interact

Graduate School in Computer Science, CUGS

The scientific scope of the graduate school CUGS at the Department of Computer and Information Science at Linköping University includes central parts of core computer science and computer engineering.

Cybersecurity

Welcome to the cybersecurity platform at Linköping University. Here you can find information about research and education in cybersecurity, as well as researchers and teachers active in the field.

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WASP at Department of Computer and Information Science

WASP, Wallenberg AI autonomous systems and software program, is the largest individual research investment in Sweden in modern times. One of the WASP research environments at LiU is located at the Department of Computer and Information Science.

Teaching

Supervision and lectures

I enjoy teaching, especially in direct collaboration with students.

I supervise Master's theses on traffic analysis. Right now, I'm supervising a student who's working on developing defenses against video fingerprinting.

I've been a teaching assistant for TDTS04 Computer Networks and Distributed Systems (taught in Swedish) since Spring 2026. Sometimes, I also give guest lectures on traffic analysis, for example in TDTS21 Advanced Networking.

About the division

Cybersecurity (CYBER)

The division Cybersecurity is part of the Department of Computer and Information Science. The division conducts research and education in cybersecurity and consists of four research groups.