Fighting Censorship with Algorithms

In countries such as China or Iran where Internet censorship is prevalent, users usually rely on proxies or anonymizers to freely access the web. The obvious difficulty with this approach is that once the address of a proxy or an anonymizer is announced for use to the public, the authorities can easily filter all traffic to that address. This poses a challenge as to how proxy addresses can be announced to users without leaking too much information to the censorship authorities. In this paper, we formulate this question as an interesting algorithmic problem. We study this problem in a static and a dynamic model, and give almost tight bounds on the number of proxy servers required to give access to n people k of whom are adversaries. We will also discuss how trust networks can be used in this context. 1 Intrduction Today, Internet is playing an ever-increasing role in social and political movements around the globe. Activists connect and organize online and inform ordinary citizen (and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: FUN
• Authors: Mohammad Mahdian
• Keywords: Algorithms, FUN 2010, Interesting Algorithmic Problem, Internet Censorship, Web 2.0