Babak (Bob) AminAzad, PhD

I’m currently a senior systems engineer/researcher at Cloudflare where I work with the Bot Management R&D team and I am a member of the AI Bureau at Cloudflare. My main responsibility is to design and develop robust systems to detect and block unwanted bot traffic towards websites. I research and build detection signals, train and deploy machine learning models, and contribute to our MLOps pipeline. Most recently, I have designed and deployed HTTP/3 fingerprint, residential proxy signals, and trained ML models v7 (2023) and v8 (2024) currently used in production to detect bots running on more than 46 million HTTP requests per second. I serve on the program committee of multiple top tier security conferences. I have graduated with a PhD from the Stony Brook University in 2022 where I worked under the supervision of Professor Nikiforakis at the PragSec Lab. My main research focus aimed at uncovering vulnerabilities and practices, that make the web insecure. More specifically, my research goal was to make web applications safer, by reducing their attack surface through software debloating. I incorporate static and dynamic analysis techniques to identify unused features in web applications and remove them. In my prior work, I have showed that this method of attack surface reduction is highly effective in removing exploitable vulnerabilities from web applications. I make parsers, code analyzers and symbolic execution engines. Orthogonally to my work on attack surface reduction, I studied browser fingerprintong and designed mechanisms to detect malicious bots on the internet and protect websites by differentiating malicious bot traffic from regular users.