Related papers: How China Is Blocking Tor
The popularity of Tor as an anonymity system has made it a popular target for a variety of attacks. We focus on traffic correlation attacks, which are no longer solely in the realm of academic research with recent revelations about the NSA…
In the days immediately following the contested June 2009 Presidential election, Iranians attempting to reach news content and social media platforms were subject to unprecedented levels of the degradation, blocking and jamming of…
We examine WebRTC's suitability as a means of Internet censorship circumvention. WebRTC is a framework and suite of protocols for peer-to-peer communication between web browsers. We analyze the implementation differences in instantiations…
Users of the Tor anonymity system suffer from lessthan- ideal performance, in part because circuit building and selection processes are not tuned for speed. In this paper, we examine both the process of selecting among pre-built circuits…
Anonymity services have seen high growth rates with increased usage in the past few years. Among various services, Tor is one of the most popular peer-to-peer anonymizing service. In this survey paper, we summarize, analyze, classify and…
The primary objective of an anonymity tool is to protect the anonymity of its users through the implementation of strong encryption and obfuscation techniques. As a result, it becomes very difficult to monitor and identify users activities…
The cross-strait relationship between China and Taiwan is marked by increasing hostility around potential reunification. We analyze an unattributed bot network and how repeater bots engaged in an influence campaign against Taiwan following…
In mid-2025, Iran experienced a novel, stealthy Internet shutdown that preserved global routing presence while isolating domestic users through deep packet inspection, aggressive throttling, and selective protocol blocking. This paper…
Recent initiatives known as Future Internet Architectures (FIAs) seek to redesign the Internet to improve performance, scalability, and security. However, some governments perceive Internet access as a threat to their political standing and…
We introduce and investigate *targeting adversaries* who selectively attack users of Tor or other secure-communication networks. We argue that attacks by such adversaries are more realistic and more significant threats to those most relying…
TikTok has seen exponential growth as a platform, fuelled by the success of its proprietary recommender algorithm which serves tailored content to every user - though not without controversy. Users complain of their content being unfairly…
Weibo and other popular Chinese microblogging sites are well known for exercising internal censorship, to comply with Chinese government requirements. This research seeks to quantify the mechanisms of this censorship: how fast and how…
Gender issues faced by women can range from workplace harassment to domestic violence. While publicly disclosing these issues on social media can be hard, some may incline to express themselves anonymously. We approached such an anonymous…
Tor is a popular low-latency anonymity network. However, Tor does not protect against the exploitation of an insecure application to reveal the IP address of, or trace, a TCP stream. In addition, because of the linkability of Tor streams…
Several hundred Tor exit relays together push more than 1 GiB/s of network traffic. However, it is easy for exit relays to snoop and tamper with anonymised network traffic and as all relays are run by independent volunteers, not all of them…
Widespread Chinese social media applications such as Weibo are widely known for monitoring and deleting posts to conform to Chinese government requirements. In this paper, we focus on analyzing a dataset of censored and uncensored posts in…
Internet censorship and global Internet reachability are prevalent topics of today's Internet. Nonetheless, the impact of network topology and Internet architecture to these aspects of the Internet is under-explored. With the goal of…
Tor is a widely used anonymity network that conceals user identities by routing traffic through encrypted relays, yet it remains vulnerable to traffic correlation attacks that deanonymize users by matching patterns in ingress and egress…
Providing reliable and surreptitious communications is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful state level censors. In this paper we introduce Tithonus, a framework that builds on the Bitcoin blockchain and network to provide…
In the Tor network, anonymity is achieved through a multi-layered architecture, which comes at the cost of a complex network. Scheduling data in this network is a challenging task and the current approach shows to be incapable of avoiding…