The Science of Internet Freedom

Overview

This research project looks at whether the scientific method may improve tools that promote freedom on the Internet, such as tools for circumventing censorship on Internet. A key component of the project is empirical measurements of the Internet to understand the issues that real users face.

We thank the NSF for its support.

Publications

• Michael Carl Tschantz, Sadia Afroz, Anonymous, and Vern Paxson

  SoK: Towards Grounding Censorship Circumvention in Empiricism

  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2016
• Sheharbano Khattak, David Fifield, Sadia Afroz, Mobin Javed, Srikanth Sundaresan, Vern Paxson, Steven J. Murdoch, and Damon McCoy

  Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users

  Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2016
• Bill Marczak, Nicholas Weaver, Jakub Dalek, Roya Ensafi, David Fifield, Sarah McKune, Arn Rey, John Scott-Railton, Ron Deibert, and Vern Paxson

  An Analysis of China's “Great Cannon”

  Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), 2015
• Bill Marczak, Nicholas Weaver, Jakub Dalek, Roya Ensafi, David Fifield, Sarah McKune, Arn Rey, John Scott-Railton, Ronald Deibert, and Vern Paxson

  China's Great Cannon

  Research Brief, Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, 2015
• David Fifield, Chang Lan, Rod Hynes, Percy Wegmann, and Vern Paxson

  Blocking-resistant Communication through Domain Fronting

  Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2015
• Roya Ensafi, David Fifield, Philipp Winter, Nick Feamster, Nicholas Weaver, and Vern Paxson

  Examining How the Great Firewall Discovers Hidden Circumvention Servers

  Internet Measurement Conference, 2015
• Sadia Afroz, David Fifield, Michael Carl Tschantz, Vern Paxson, and J. D. Tygar

  Censorship Arms Race: Research vs. Practice

  Workshop on Hot Topics in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), 2015
• Ben Jones, Roya Ensafi, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson, and Nick Weaver

  Ethical Concerns for Censorship Measurement

  Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Ethics in Networked Systems Research, 2015
• Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Syed Ali Khayam, Zartash Afzal Uzmi, and Vern Paxson

  A Look at the Consequences of Internet Censorship Through an ISP Lens

  Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, 2014
• Michael Carl Tschantz, Sadia Afroz, Vern Paxson, and J. D. Tygar

  On Modeling the Costs of Censorship

  Tech. report arXiv:1409.3211v1, ArXiv, 2014