Carleton University - School of Computer Science Honours Project
Winter 2022
A New Approach to Censorship-Circumvention: Computing and Compiling Decentralized Censored Websites
Devan Andersen
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ABSTRACT
Internet censorship around the world is increasing, and more than ever solutions for circumvention are needed for what is an evolving censorship arms-race. In the past, solutions have focused on secrets which obfuscate storage information, user data, and other pivotal implementation details, allowing for vulnerabilities when those secrets are inevitably uncovered. Censorship-circumvention technologies would benefit from designing systems that use implementation details to their advantage and do not seek to obfuscate this information. In this thesis, we propose a system which breaks up censored websites, which we call candidate websites, onto other websites across the network, which we call helper websites. We design and implement a proof of concept algorithm for the distribution of candidate website content across helper websites. We discuss the results for our proof of concept algorithm, and make suggestions for future research around implementation and gathering and storage of helper websites based on what candidate website a user is looking for.