Paper Info
Title
Message in a bottle: sailing past censorship
Abstract
Exploiting recent advances in monitoring technology and the drop of its costs, authoritarian and oppressive regimes are tightening the grip around the virtual lives of their citizens. Meanwhile, the dissidents, oppressed by these regimes, are organizing online, cloaking their activity with anti-censorship systems that typically consist of a network of anonymizing proxies. The censors have become well aware of this, and they are systematically finding and blocking all the entry points to these networks. So far, they have been quite successful. We believe that, to achieve resilience to blocking, anti-censorship systems must abandon the idea of having a limited number of entry points. Instead, they should establish first contact in an online location arbitrarily chosen by each of their users. To explore this idea, we have developed Message In A Bottle, a protocol where any blog post becomes a potential "drop point" for hidden messages. We have developed and released a proof-of-concept application of our system, and demonstrated its feasibility. To block this system, censors are left with a needle-in-a-haystack problem: Unable to identify what bears hidden messages, they must block everything, effectively disconnecting their own network from a large part of the Internet. This, hopefully, is a cost too high to bear.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2523649.2523654
ACSAC
Keywords
Field
DocType
large part,entry point,past censorship,anti-censorship system,own network,anonymizing proxy,hidden message,blog post,drop point,limited number,online location,steganography
Psychological resilience,Steganography,Cloaking,Internet privacy,Censorship,Computer security,Censorship resistance,Computer science,Authoritarianism,The Internet
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.66
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luca Invernizzi127514.27
Christopher Kruegel28799516.05
Giovanni Vigna37121507.72