Analyzing TLS Censorship Differences in and between Autonomous Systems

Various state-actors around the world deploy some degree of censorship. To prevent users from accessing specific websites, they alter, drop, and redirect connection attempts to websites and services they deem malicious. To this end, they analyze the packet headers of the user's connections. This is particularly easy for HTTP connections but also possible for TLS connections (see SNI). To feasibly deploy widespread censoring in a nation-state, censoring is often delegated to private companies like internet service providers. This leads to different censorship deployed in a single country and incomplete results when analyzing the censorship from a single vantage point (see here).

IP ranges owned by Internet Service Providers and others are grouped in so-called autonomous systems. Their censorship behavior should be analyzed in this thesis. To this end, you analyze censorship of hosts in a single autonomous system and compare it to censorship happening in different autonomous systems. The analyzed censorship includes, but is not limited to, HTTP and HTTPS censorship.

Requirements:
- Programming, knowledge of Java preferred
- Knowledge of TLS, HTTP, Network Stack (TCP/IP)
- Interest in censorship (circumvention)

Who to message:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Juraj Somorovsky or Niklas Niere