Abstract
This position paper presents the following thought experiment: can we build communication protocols that (1) are sufficiently useful that they achieve widespread adoption as general-purpose communication mechanisms and (2) thwart censorship as a consequence of their design? We posit that a useful communication platform that is inherently resistant to traffic analysis, if widely adopted and used primarily for purposes not related to censorship circumvention, may be too politically and economically costly for a government to block.
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Notes
- 1.
The use of the hash function provides some privacy protections, since it makes it more difficult to cull email addresses and network locations from the directory.
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by NSF CAREER CNS-1149832 and NSF grants CNS-1064986, CNS-1204347, and CNS-1223825. The findings and opinions described in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Additionally, this material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific under Contract No. N66001-11-C-4020. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific.
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Tan, H., Sherr, M. (2014). Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J., Matyáš, V., Švenda, P., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXII. Security Protocols 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8809. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12400-1_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12400-1_21
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