Pass it on: social networks stymie censors

  • Authors:
  • Yair Sovran;Alana Libonati;Jinyang Li

  • Affiliations:
  • New York University;New York University;New York University

  • Venue:
  • IPTPS'08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Peer-to-peer systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Many countries exploit control over the Internet infrastructure to block access to "grey" materials. One common way to access blocked contents is to relay traffic via an unblocked proxy operating outside the censored domain. This paper discusses the challenges facing any proxy-based circumvention system and argues that a successful system should disseminate proxies' addresses to legitimate users while shielding the addresses from the censor who, posing as a user, could learn of and block the proxies themselves.We propose Kaleidoscope, a circumvention system that disseminates proxy addresses over a social network whose links correspond to existing real world social relationships among users. Kaleidoscope ensures each node learns only a small, consistent subset of the proxies. Because the censor is unlikely to subvert a large fraction of the social graph, he is not able to learn of, and thus block, a large number of proxies.