Related papers: Censors' Delay in Blocking Circumvention Proxies
Our goal is to empirically discover how censors react to the introduction of new proxy servers that can be used to circumvent their information controls. We examine a specific case, that of obfuscated Tor bridges, and conduct experiments…
Not only the free web is victim to China's excessive censorship, but also the Tor anonymity network: the Great Firewall of China prevents thousands of potential Tor users from accessing the network. In this paper, we investigate how the…
An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the uncensored network is a frequent target of…
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…
Internet censors seek ways to identify and block internet access to information they deem objectionable. Increasingly, censors deploy advanced networking tools such as deep-packet inspection (DPI) to identify such connections. In response,…
Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous…
Tor, one of the most popular censorship circumvention systems, faces regular blocking attempts by censors. Thus, to facilitate access, it relies on "pluggable transports" (PTs) that disguise Tor's traffic and make it hard for the adversary…
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…
A core technique used by popular proxy-based circumvention systems like Tor, Psiphon, and Lantern is to secretly share the IP addresses of circumvention proxies with the censored clients for them to be able to use such systems. For…
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,…
One of the Internet's greatest strengths is the degree to which it facilitates access to any of its resources from users anywhere in the world. However, users in the developing world have complained of websites blocking their countries. We…
A nation-scale firewall, colloquially referred to as the "Great Firewall of China," implements many different types of censorship and content filtering to control China's Internet traffic. Past work has shown that the firewall occasionally…
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…
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of topics,…
We develop a means to detect ongoing per-country anomalies in the daily usage metrics of the Tor anonymous communication network, and demonstrate the applicability of this technique to identifying likely periods of internet censorship and…
Internet censorship limits the access of nodes residing within a specific network environment to the public Internet, and vice versa. During the last decade, techniques for conducting Internet censorship have been developed further.…
Over the years, the Internet has democratized the flow of information. Unfortunately, in parallel, authoritarian regimes and other entities (such as ISPs) for their vested interests have curtailed this flow by partially or fully censoring…
This paper presents a detailed study of the Internet censorship in India. We consolidated a list of potentially blocked websites from various public sources to assess censorship mechanisms used by nine major ISPs. To begin with, we…
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…
Free web proxies promise anonymity and censorship circumvention at no cost. Several websites publish lists of free proxies organized by country, anonymity level, and performance. These lists index hundreds of thousand of hosts discovered…