October 12, 2026
Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science William Tolley is contributing to an Open Technology Fund (OTF)-supported research project focused on internet censorship, protecting online privacy, and strengthening access to information.
As co-founder and president of Breakpointing Bad, a nonprofit dedicated to computer security research that supports privacy, censorship resistance, free expression, and human rights, Tolley is part of a research team that recently received more than $219,000 from OTF to support NetworkGenie. The project aims to give researchers new ways to observe and manipulate low-level network traffic on Android devices without requiring users to root their phones.
“What originally attracted me to this kind of work was seeing the research my dissertation advisor was doing when I was getting started,” Tolley says. “It was computer science, but it wasn’t just academic work. He was studying censorship and surveillance in places where the research had very real consequences, and some of the work involved travel, fieldwork, and even a degree of personal risk.”
Dr. Tolley contributes to NetworkGenie through technical collaboration, project management, and the server, network, build, and testing infrastructure that supports the team's development and evaluation of the system.
“The broader goal of NetworkGenie is to give researchers and developers better tools for understanding what is happening to internet traffic on a device and for experimenting with censorship measurement and circumvention,” Tolley says. “This also brings capabilities that are traditionally restricted to desktop computers or specially modified devices to the phones people use every day, helping researchers further measure internet censorship and develop tools to circumvent it.”
NetworkGenie complements Dr. Tolley’s broader research into the technologies that shape censorship, privacy, and access to information. Dr. Tolley has also coauthored “Machine-in-the-Tunnel: Practical Connection Inference, DNS Injection, and Defenses for Modern VPNs” with two colleagues from Breakpointing Bad. Accepted for presentation at the 2026 Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES) in The Hague, Netherlands, the latter article examines how attackers can tell what someone is doing through an encrypted VPN connection and redirect certain traffic outside the VPN without having to break the encryption. Having developed defenses designed to mitigate such attacks, the work contributes to Dr. Tolley’s research on architectural weaknesses in privacy technologies. This also highlights risks for those who rely on VPNs to protect their privacy, avoid surveillance, and access information in environments affected by censorship.
“For me, that is an important progression in the research,” Tolley says. “Finding a vulnerability is useful, but understanding why it exists, determining how broadly the underlying problem applies, and developing practical defenses are much more valuable.”
Dr. Tolley also emphasizes student involvement in advancing this research. He has coauthored the articles “Architectural VPN Vulnerabilities, Disclosure Fatigue, and Structural Failures” and “Beyond the OS Trust Store: TLS Trust in the Russian Android Ecosystem”, both in collaboration with Everett Morse ’29. These publications demonstrate the opportunities for students to contribute to meaningful research while developing their expertise in the field.
As Dr. Tolley continues to expand his research and lead the charge in this rapidly developing area of study, his work is helping advance the tools and technologies needed to better understand the evolving challenges surrounding privacy, censorship, and security in a fast-changing world.