Internet Freedom in the Network’s Core
Without a fundamental advance in censorship circumvention technology, censored users worldwide face a future of steadily diminishing Internet freedom. Today’s major circumvention tools are all becoming less and less effective, because they all share a fundamental weakness of design—in one way or another, they all try to connect censored users with uncensored proxy servers. Tool providers, trying to help censored users find and use these proxy servers before sovereign censors can find and block them, are locked in a losing game of cat and mouse, as censors deploy increasingly sophisticated censorship functionality into the core of their national networks. Evidence of censors’ growing advantage is everywhere: New Tor bridges in China now last less than 48 hours, and in Iran, the regime recently created nation-wide VPN outages ahead of its national elections. The potent new censorship tools that drive these developments are proliferating to a growing list of censoring regimes. New technology capable of disrupting this trend would have a transformative global impact, unlocking the human right to seek, receive,and impart information, and the Internet’s potential to deliver responsive governance and broad economic opportunity for people in need around the world.
Decoy routing can meet this need: it is a scalable and sustainable next-generation approach that offers a fundamental advance over today’s Internet freedom tools. Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, decoy routing locates proxy functionality in the core of the network. This makes censorship much more costly, because it is no longer possible to selectively block servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any data exchange between a censoring country and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.
Decoy routing can give censored users the upper hand in the global struggle for Internet freedom—but it will only reach those users if we address the critical gaps identified in this proposal. We have shown that decoy routing works in the lab. This project will prepare decoy routing for real-world deployment.
For up-to-date project status and research contributions, please visit the Refraction Networking portal at https://refraction.network/
Coalition members: University of Michigan, University of Illinois, Raytheon BBN Technologies, Merit Network, Open Internet Tools Project, Robinson + Yu