Abstract:
Billions of people worldwide are affected by censorship, limiting their access to information, including on political, social and religious topics. As the internet is an important source of information, many censors block resources on the Internet. Such censors inspect and decode users’ data flows. A new protocol, QUIC, is included in HTTP/3, the successor to current HTTPS protocols. QUIC has already shown to be a target of such censorship since its introduction.
In this thesis, we identify QUIC censorship in Russia and identify how it changed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We uncover reliable options for circumventing QUIC censorship in Russia. Our results also identify QUIC as a viable option to circumvent censorship in China and enable continued censorship observation. To this end, we designed and implemented a scan suite to analyze QUIC censorship automatically. Using our scan suite, we performed worldwide echo scans and vantage point scans from China, India, and Russia.