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Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies

  • Conference paper
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS 2012)

Abstract

While Internet access to certain sites is blocked in some parts of the world, these restrictions are often circumvented using proxies outside the censored region. Often these proxies are blocked as soon as they are discovered. In this paper we propose a browser-based proxy creation system that generates a large number of short-lived proxies. Clients using the system seamlessly hop from one proxy to the next as these browser-based proxies appear and disappear. We discuss a number of technical challenges that had to be overcome for this system to work and report on its performance and security. We show that browser-based short-lived proxies provide adequate bandwidth for video delivery and argue that blocking them can be challenging.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Fifield, D. et al. (2012). Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies. In: Fischer-Hübner, S., Wright, M. (eds) Privacy Enhancing Technologies. PETS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7384. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31680-7_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31680-7_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31679-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31680-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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