Censorship Resistant Web Applications

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Of the countless individuals around the world confronted by Internet censorship every day, only a small fraction are successful in reaching their destinations. This is a failing of the censorship circumvention community. The widespread nature of censorship reflects our inability to understand, work around, or fix the problem as a whole. This dissertation presents novel approaches to measuring, circumventing, and resisting Internet censorship without relying on users. In particular, we present (a) Satellite, a system for remotely monitoring the state of DNS-based censorship. Satellite is able to document new episodes of censorship and shed new light on already documented cases. (b) uProxy, a system for in-browser circumvention based on social trust and private routes for individual users. Through circumvention, we deploy an easy-to-use system that is already in use by tens of thousands of users. (c) Activist, a library allowing web publishers to circumvent many forms of censorship without any user involvement. Through resistance, we have established an alternative approach to censorship circumvention. A particular focus is the implementation of these systems; all three exist as public, free, open-source code.