48,858 research outputs found
Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect
This position paper presents the following thought experiment: can we build communication protocols that (1) are sufficiently useful that they achieve widespread adoption as general-purpose communication mechanisms and (2) thwart censorship as a consequence of their design? We posit that a useful communication platform that is inherently resistant to traffic analysis, if widely adopted and used primarily for purposes not related to censorship circumvention, may be too politically and economically costly for a government to block.
Systemization of Pluggable Transports for Censorship Resistance
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 censorship due to the ease with which a nation-state censor can control it.
A number of censorship resistance systems have been developed thus far to help
circumvent blocking on this link, which we refer to as link circumvention
systems (LCs). The variety and profusion of attack vectors available to a
censor has led to an arms race, leading to a dramatic speed of evolution of
LCs. Despite their inherent complexity and the breadth of work in this area,
there is no systematic way to evaluate link circumvention systems and compare
them against each other. In this paper, we (i) sketch an attack model to
comprehensively explore a censor's capabilities, (ii) present an abstract model
of a LC, a system that helps a censored client communicate with a server over
the Internet while resisting censorship, (iii) describe an evaluation stack
that underscores a layered approach to evaluate LCs, and (iv) systemize and
evaluate existing censorship resistance systems that provide link
circumvention. We highlight open challenges in the evaluation and development
of LCs and discuss possible mitigations.Comment: Content from this paper was published in Proceedings on Privacy
Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Volume 2016, Issue 4 (July 2016) as "SoK:
Making Sense of Censorship Resistance Systems" by Sheharbano Khattak, Tariq
Elahi, Laurent Simon, Colleen M. Swanson, Steven J. Murdoch and Ian Goldberg
(DOI 10.1515/popets-2016-0028
(Il)Legitimisation of the role of the nation state: Understanding of and reactions to Internet censorship in Turkey
This study aims to explore Turkish citizen-consumers' understanding of and reactions to censorship of websites in Turkey by using in-depth interviews and online ethnography. In an environment where sites such as YouTube and others are increasingly being banned, the citizen-consumers' macro-level understanding is that such censorship is part of a wider ideological plan and their micro-level understanding is that their relationship with the wider global network is reduced, in the sense that they have trouble accessing full information on products, services and experiences. The study revealed that citizen-consumers engage in two types of resistance strategies against such domination by the state: using irony as passive resistance, and using the very same technology used by the state to resist its domination
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