Abstract:
Censorship systems such as the Great Firewall (GFW) have been continuously refined to enhance their filtering capabilities. However, most prior studies, and in particular the GFW, have been limited in scope and conducted over short time periods, leading to gaps in our understanding of the GFW’s evolving Web censorship mechanisms over time. We introduce GFWeb, a novel system designed to discover domain blocklists used by the GFW for censoring Web access.
Abstract:
Domain probe lists—used to determine which URLs to probe for Web censorship—play a critical role in Internet censorship measurement studies. Indeed, the size and accuracy of the domain probe list limits the set of censored pages that can be detected; inaccurate lists can lead to an incomplete view of the censorship landscape or biased results. Previous efforts to generate domain probe lists have been mostly manual or crowdsourced. This approach is time-consuming, prone to errors, and does not scale well to the ever-changing censorship landscape.
Most online communications rely on DNS to map domain names to their hosting IP address(es). Previous work has shown that DNS-based network interference is widespread due to the unencrypted and unauthenticated nature of the original DNS protocol. In …
Abstract: 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 GFW’s behavior. In this study, we introduce GFWatch, a large-scale, longitudinal measurement platform capable of testing hundreds of millions of domains daily, enabling continuous monitoring of the GFW’s DNS filtering behavior.
We present the results of running GFWatch over a nine-month period, during which we tested an average of 411M domains per day and detected a total of 311K domains censored by GFW’s DNS filter.
In this blog post, we summarize the outcomes of our project entitled “An Empirical Study of the I2P Anonymity Network and its Censorship Resistance” supported by the Open Technology Fund - Information Controls Fellowship Program.
0. Introduction The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is one of the most well-known and widely used anonymity networks. I2P can be used by privacy-conscious Internet users to protect their online privacy, or by censored users to bypass censorship conducted by local Internet regimes.