Measuring, Understanding, and Demystifying the Practices and Ecosystem of Global Internet Censorship

We conduct research to measure, understand, and defend against online censorship by systematically investigating how censorship systems operate in practice, how they affect online users, and how such controls can be reliably and safely circumvented.
The center of the research is Disguiser, a framework that enables end-to-end measurement to accurately and automatically investigate global Internet censorship practices by providing a static payload as ground truth, which can be used to indicate the occurrence of censorship when the static payload has been altered by network devices. Moreover, the framework can facilitate extended measurements for investigating extensive aspects of Internet censorship, from pinpointing censor devices’ locations to exploring their policies and deployment.

Our research is supported through the Internet Freedom Fund from Open Technology Fund.