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. Countries facilitate censorship by inspecting protocols like IP, TPC, HTTP, DNS, TLS, and VPNs. The sophistication of censors varies as much as the techniques the use. Overall, this leads to a diverse landscape of censorship around the world. In recent years, the analysis of censorship has increased greatly. Automated tools for global censorship analysis and circumvention have been introduced together with country-specific in-depth analyses.
To aid in this acquisition of knowledge, we want to ascertain censorship techniques and the circumventability of censorship around the globe. This includes both country-specific analyses and new circumvention or analysis techniques. Below, we gather potential thesis topics.
QUIC Censorship Combinatorial Testing In a recent Master's thesis, initial QUIC censorship in Russia was found. This thesis also found some first successful circumventions. Your goal is to integrate QUIC into our new framework and then to perform a more structured analysis of QUIC censorship using combinatorial testing / exhaustive manipulation combinations of different fields. With this, we hope to find even more interesting circumvention methods for QUIC.
WebRTC Censorship WebRTC is a complex protocol that is used in applications such as video conferencing systems. Some countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) explicitly censor WebRTC traffic to block Skype / WhatsApp Calls or Discord. WebRTC has also been used in popular censorship circumvention tools, creating an incentive for countries to find ways to successfully censor this protocol. Your goal is to familiarize yourself with WebRTC and explore the landscape of WebRTC censorship. Some possible questions are: At which point in the protocol is the traffic blocked? What information is used to censor connections? Which countries employ WebRTC censorship?
Censorship in Marginally Analyzed Countries In recent years, some countries have been analyzed more thoroughly than others. Prime examples are the censors of Russia, China, and India. However, censorship occurs in many countries around the globe. In this thesis, you will focus censorship analysis on one or a few countries that have not been analyzed thoroughly up until now. You will also compare the censorship techniques you encounter with those of more thoroughly analyzed censors.
None of these topics interest you but you still want to analyze censorship in your thesis? Feel free to contact us with your own ideas. We can try to find a topic together!
Requirements (usually):
- Programming, Java, Kotlin, Python
- Knowledge of DNS, HTTP, Network Stack (TCP/IP)
- Interest in censorship (circumvention)
