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Related papers: How China Is Blocking Tor

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The Onion Router (Tor) is a controversial network whose utility is constantly under scrutiny. On the one hand, it allows for anonymous interaction and cooperation of users seeking untraceable navigation on the Internet. This freedom also…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Alfonso Rodriguez Barredo-Valenzuela , Sergio Pastrana Portillo , Guillermo Suarez-Tangil

Internet censorship is enforced by numerous governments worldwide, however, due to the lack of publicly available information, as well as the inherent risks of performing active measurements, it is often hard for the research community to…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2014-11-06 Abdelberi Chaabane , Terence Chen , Mathieu Cunche , Emiliano De Cristofaro , Arik Friedman , Mohamed Ali Kaafar

Tor is currently the most popular network for anonymous Internet access. It critically relies on volunteer nodes called bridges for relaying Internet traffic when a user's ISP blocks connections to Tor. Unfortunately, current methods for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-08-02 Mahdi Zamani , Jared Saia , Jedidiah Crandall

One of the main challenges faced by a user today is protecting their privacy, especially during widespread surveil- lance. This led to the development of privacy infrastructures whose main purpose is to guarantee users privacy. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-12-20 Nethra Balasubramanian

Internet censorship continues to impact billions of people worldwide, and measurement of it remains an important focus of research. However, most Internet censorship measurements have focused solely on the IPv4 Internet infrastructure. Yet,…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Jack Wampler , Hammas Bin Tanveer , Rishab Nithyanand , Eric Wustrow

There are not many known ways to break Tor anonymity, and they require an enormous amount of computational power. Controlling both entrance and exit nodes allows an attacker to compromise client IP with enough pattern analysis. If an .onion…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-12-13 Stephanie Abraham , Tyler Silva , Robert Decourcy , Jim Cardon

Some BitTorrent users are running BitTorrent on top of Tor to preserve their privacy. In this extended abstract, we discuss three different attacks to reveal the IP address of BitTorrent users on top of Tor. In addition, we exploit the…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2010-04-09 Stevens Le Blond , Pere Manils , Abdelberi Chaabane , Mohamed Ali Kaafar , Arnaud Legout , Claude Castellucia , Walid Dabbous

The increasing use of encrypted data within file storage and in network communications leaves investigators with many challenges. One of the most challenging is the Tor protocol, as its main focus is to protect the privacy of the user, in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Matt Muir , Petra Leimich , William J Buchanan

We present measurements and analysis of censorship on Weibo, a popular microblogging site in China. Since we were limited in the rate at which we could download posts, we identified users likely to participate in sensitive topics and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2012-11-28 Tao Zhu , David Phipps , Adam Pridgen , Jedidiah R. Crandall , Dan S. Wallach

Internet censorship impacts large segments of the Internet, but so far, prior work has focused almost exclusively on performing measurements using IPv4. As the Internet grows, and more users connect, IPv6 is increasingly supported and…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ian Martiny , Hammas Bin Tanveer , Jack Wampler , Rishab Nithyanand , Eric Wustrow

Since 2006, Turkmenistan has been listed as one of the few Internet enemies by Reporters without Borders due to its extensively censored Internet and strictly regulated information control policies. Existing reports of filtering in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Sadia Nourin , Van Tran , Xi Jiang , Kevin Bock , Nick Feamster , Nguyen Phong Hoang , Dave Levin

Tor provides anonymity to millions of users around the globe which has made it a valuable target for malicious actors. As a low-latency anonymity system, it is vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks from strong passive adversaries such…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Gabriel Karl Gegenhuber , Markus Maier , Florian Holzbauer , Wilfried Mayer , Georg Merzdovnik , Edgar Weippl , Johanna Ullrich

In this study, we focus on understanding patterns of users whose repost contents would later be censored on Weibo, a counterpart of Twitter in China as a social media platform. Little is known about the way regulations and censorship work…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Yichi Qian , Feng Yuan , Hanjia Lyu , Jiebo Luo

We model and analyze passive adversaries that monitors Tor traffic crossing the border of a jurisdiction an adversary is controlling. We show that a single adversary is able to connect incoming and outgoing traffic of their border, tracking…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Herman Galteland , Kristian Gjøsteen

Open proxies forward traffic on behalf of any Internet user. Listed on open proxy aggregator sites, they are often used to bypass geographic region restrictions or circumvent censorship. Open proxies sometimes also provide a weak form of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-28 Akshaya Mani , Tavish Vaidya , David Dworken , Micah Sherr

Decoy Routing, the use of routers (rather than end hosts) as proxies, is a new direction in anti-censorship research. Decoy Routers (DRs), placed in Autonomous Systems, proxy traffic from users; so the adversary, e.g., a censorious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Devashish Gosain , Anshika Agarwal , Sambuddho Chakravarty , H. B. Acharya

Tor users are vulnerable to deanonymization by an adversary that can observe some Tor relays or some parts of the network. We demonstrate that previous network-aware path-selection algorithms that propose to solve this problem are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2017-01-30 Aaron Johnson , Rob Jansen , Aaron D. Jaggard , Joan Feigenbaum , Paul Syverson

Deep packet inspection technology became a cornerstone of Internet censorship by facilitating cheap and effective filtering of what censors consider undesired information. Moreover, filtering is not limited to simple pattern matching but…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2013-05-15 Philipp Winter , Tobias Pulls , Juergen Fuss

This paper is dedicated to using a classifier to predict whether a Weibo post would be censored under the Chinese internet. Through randomized sampling from \citeauthor{Fu2021} and Chinese tokenizing strategies, we constructed a cleaned…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Matt Prodani , Tianchu Ze , Yushen Hu

University cybersecurity protocols have intensified dramatically in response to rising threats of data breaches, ransomware, and credential theft. While necessary, these measures have created a parallel crisis of accessibility - even for…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Benjamin Kenwright