RAN: Routing Around Nation-States

Many countries now engage in interference, degradation, blocking, or surveillance of Internet traffic. In response, individuals, organizations, and even entire countries are taking steps to control the geographic regions that their traffic traverses. For example, some countries are building local Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) to prevent domestic traffic from detouring through other countries. Unfortunately, our measurements reveal that many such ongoing efforts are futile, for two reasons: local content is often hosted in foreign countries, and networks within a country often fail to peer with one another. Yet, our work offers hope: we also find that routing traffic through strategically placed relay nodes can reduce transnational routing detours, in the best case, from 85% of studied paths to 38% of studied paths. Based on these findings, we design and implement RAN, a lightweight system that routes a client’s web traffic around specified countries with no modifications to client software (and in many cases with little performance overhead). Anyone can use RAN today; we have deployed long-running RAN relays around the world, released the source code, and provided instructions to allow clients to use the system.