Tor has grown beyond its original purpose as and has since become an important Internet circumvention tool. We specifically examine it usability as a censorship circumvention tool, an essential facet for adoption and use. We focus our analysis on the connection configuration dialog of Tor browser, as censorship circumvention requires correct transport configurations. Our talk will describe a fu...

News organizations are often the targets of Internet censorship. This paper will look at two technical considerations for the BBC, based on its distribution of non-English content into countries such as Iran and China, where the news services are permanently unavailable from the official BBC websites: blocking detection and circumvention. This study examines an internal BBC prototype system bui...

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...

The fundamental requirement for censorship resistance is content discoverability — it should be easy for users to find and access documents, but not to discover what they store locally, to preserve plausible deniability. We describe a design for “one-way indexing” to provide plausibly-deniable content search and storage in a censorship resistant network without requiring outof-band communicatio...

Internet freedom advocacy sites [1] have studied and documented these censorship practices, enumerating the techniques employed by the censoring bodies. For example, censors block the IP addresses of controversial websites, inspect TCP packet exchanges for keywords and tamper with DNS records. These advocacy sites have already catalogued the types of sites that are censored and the means by whi...

When Malaysia embarked into its gigantic multimedia super-corridor project in 1995, the equivalent to the US Silicon Valley, one of her promises to her foreign counterparts is that there will be no censorship on the Internet. This assurance was embodied in section 3 (3) of the Communication and Multimedia Act 1998 that states “nothing in this Act shall be construed as permitting the censorship ...

Censorship circumvention tools face an arms race as they work to evade increasingly motivated censors. Tools which have distinctive features can be detected and blocked by censors (e.g., Tor is actively targeted by censors around the world). As a result, there is increasing interest in disguising censorship circumvention traffic as benign protocols. SkypeMorph [1] and StegoTorus [2] are two plu...