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Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect

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Book cover Security Protocols XXII (Security Protocols 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8809))

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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. 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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA

    Henry Tan & Micah Sherr

Authors
  1. Henry Tan
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  2. Micah Sherr
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Micah Sherr .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

    Bruce Christianson

  2. University of Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

    James Malcolm

  3. Masaryk University Faculty of Informatics, Brno, Czech Republic

    Vashek Matyáš

  4. Masaryk University Faculty of Informatics, Brno, Czech Republic

    Petr Švenda

  5. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

    Frank Stajano

  6. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada

    Jonathan Anderson

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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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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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-12399-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-12400-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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