Related papers: Censors' Delay in Blocking Circumvention Proxies
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…
Internet censors often rely on information in the first few packets of a connection to censor unwanted traffic. With the rise of the QUIC transport protocol, prior work has suggested the method of using QUIC connection migration to conceal…
The use of TLS proxies to intercept encrypted traffic is controversial since the same mechanism can be used for both benevolent purposes, such as protecting against malware, and for malicious purposes, such as identity theft or warrantless…
An increasing number of countries are passing laws that facilitate the mass surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, governments and citizens are increasingly paying attention to the countries that their Internet traffic traverses. In…
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…
Several recently proposed censorship circumvention systems use encrypted network channels of popular applications to hide their communications. For example, a Tor pluggable transport called Snowflake uses the WebRTC data channel, while a…
A core problem in the development and maintenance of crowd-sourced filter lists is that their maintainers cannot confidently predict whether (and where) a new filter list rule will break websites. This is a result of enormity of the Web,…
Tor is an anonymity network that allows offering and accessing various kinds of resources, known as hidden services, while guaranteeing sender and receiver anonymity. The Tor web is the set of web resources that exist on the Tor network,…
Recent years have seen a sharp rise in adblocker use, driven by increased web tracking and personalized ads. However, a significant issue for adblocker users is the web breakages they encounter, which worsens their browsing experience and…
One of the primary ways in which India engages in online censorship is by ordering Internet Service Providers (ISPs) operating in its jurisdiction to block access to certain websites for its users. This paper reports the different…
Anonymity systems such as Tor aim to enable users to communicate in a manner that is untraceable by adversaries that control a small number of machines. To provide efficient service to users, these anonymity systems make full use of…
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…
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…
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…
The treatment of Internet traffic is increasingly affected by national policies that require the ISPs in a country to adopt common protocols or practices. Examples include government enforced censorship, wiretapping, and protocol deployment…
The DNS filtering apparatus of China's Great Firewall (GFW) has evolved considerably over the past two decades. However, most prior studies of China's DNS filtering were performed over short time periods, leading to unnoticed changes in the…
Website fingerprinting is an attack that uses size and timing characteristics of encrypted downloads to identify targeted websites. Since this can defeat the privacy goals of anonymity networks such as Tor, many algorithms to defend against…
Ever since the introduction of the internet, it has been void of any privacy. The majority of internet traffic currently is and always has been unencrypted. A number of anonymous communication overlay networks exist whose aim it is to…
Tor, a widely utilized privacy network, enables anonymous communication but is vulnerable to flow correlation attacks that deanonymize users by correlating traffic patterns from Tor's ingress and egress segments. Various defenses have been…
Open communication over the Internet poses a serious threat to countries with repressive regimes, leading them to develop and deploy censorship mechanisms within their networks. Unfortunately, existing censorship circumvention systems do…