CS858 - Internet Censorship and Surveillance

CS858 - Internet Censorship and Surveillance - Winter 2027

Schedule & Reading List

Introduction
Week 1 Introduction to the course	Jan 12	Jan 14
Select papers to present in class and a project team.	Introduction to the course	No class
Censorship and Surveillance
Week 2 Overview	Jan 19	Jan 21
	The Dangers of Surveillance N. M. Richards [Harvard Law Review'13]	Tor: The second-generation onion router R. Dingledine, N. Mathewson, P. Syverson [Sec'04]
	Inferring Mechanics of Web Censorship Around the World J. Verkamp, M. Gupta [FOCI'12]	Dissecting Tor Bridges: a Security Evaluation of Their Private and Public Infrastructures S. Matic, C. Troncoso, J. Caballero [NDSS'17]
Censorship Circumvention
Week 3 Bridge Distribution and Discovery	Jan 26	Jan 28
	Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution L. Tulloch, I. Goldberg [PoPETs'23]	Enemy At the Gateways: Censorship-Resilient Proxy Distribution Using Game Theory M. Nasr, S. Farhang, A. Houmansadr, J. Grossklags [NDSS'19]
	Troll Patrol: Anonymous User Reporting of Bridge Censorship Vecna, I. Goldberg [PoPETs'26]	Detecting Probe-resistant Proxies S. Frolov, J. Wampler, E. Wustrow [NDSS'20]
Week 4 Obfuscation	Feb 2	Feb 4
	ScrambleSuit: A Polymorph Network Protocol to Circumvent Censorship P. Winter, T. Pulls, J. Fuss [WPES'13]	TELEPATH: A Minecraft-based Covert Communication System Z. Sun, V. Shmatikov [S&P'23]
	Censorship Evasion with Unidentified Protocol Generation R. Wails, R. Jansen, A. Johnson, M. Sherr [Sec'25]	Huma: Censorship Circumvention via Web Protocol Tunneling with Deferred Traffic Replacement S. Kamali, D. Barradas [NDSS'26]
Week 5 Obfuscation (multimedia)	Feb 9	Feb 11
Project proposal due Feb 12.	SkypeMorph: Protocol Obfuscation for Tor Bridges H. Mohajeri Moghaddam, B. Li, M. Derakhshani, I. Goldberg [CCS'12]	DeltaShaper: Enabling Unobservable Censorship-resistant TCP Tunneling over Videoconferencing Streams D. Barradas, N. Santos, L. Rodrigues [PoPETs'17]
	The Parrot is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications A. Houmansadr, C. Brubaker, V. Shmatikov [S&P'13]	Poking a Hole in the Wall: Efficient Censorship-Resistant Internet Communications by Parasitizing on WebRTC D. Barradas, N. Santos, L. Rodrigues, V. Nunes [CCS'20]
Week 6 No classes - Reading Week	Feb 16	Feb 18

Week 7 Moving Targets	Feb 23	Feb 25
	Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies D. Fifield, N. Hardison, J. Ellithorpe, E. Stark, R. Dingledine, P. Porras, D. Boneh [PoPETs'12]	NetShuffle: Circumventing Censorship with Shuffle Proxies at the Edge P. T. J. Kon, A. Gattani, D. Saharia, T. Cao, D. Barradas, A. Chen, M. Sherr, B. E. Ujcich [S&P'24]
	Snowflake, a censorship circumvention system using temporary WebRTC proxies C. Bocovich, A. Breault, D. Fifield, Serene, X. Wang [Sec'24]	SpotProxy: Rediscovering the Cloud for Censorship Circumvention P. T. J. Kon, S. Kamali, J. Pei, D. Barradas, A. Chen, M. Sherr, M. Yung [Sec'24]
Week 8 Clever Tools	Mar 2	Mar 4
	Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting D. Fifield, C. Lan, R. Hynes, P. Wegmann, V. Paxson [PoPETs'15]	CensorLess: Cost-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions D. Kang, J. Sheffey, M. Wu, P. Datta, A. Houmansadr [PoPETs'26]
	Camoufler: Accessing The Censored Web By Utilizing Instant Messaging Channels P. Kumar Sharma, D. Gosain, S. Chakravarty [Asia CCS'21]	Geneva: Evolving Censorship Evasion Strategies K. Bock, G. Hughey, X. Qiang, D. Levin [CCS'19]
Week 9 Refraction Networking	Mar 9	Mar 11
Intermediate project report due Mar 12.	Slitheen: Perfectly Imitated Decoy Routing through Traffic Replacement C. Bocovich, I. Goldberg [CCS'16]	Running Refraction Networking for Real B. VanderSloot, S. Frolov, J. Wampler, S. C. Tan, I. Simpson, M. Kallitsis, J. A. Halderman, N. Borisov, E. Wustrow [PoPETs'20]
	Conjure: Summoning Proxies from Unused Address Space S. Frolov, J. Wampler, S. C. Tan, J. A. Halderman, N. Borisov, E. Wustrow [CCS'19]	Proxies as Sensors: Measuring Censorship of Refraction Networking in Iran A. Alaraj, E. Wustrow [Asia CCS'25]
Internet Blackouts
Week 10 Blackouts	Mar 16	Mar 18
	Strong Anonymity for Mesh Messaging N. Perry, B. Spang, S. Eskandarian, D. Boneh [arXiv'22]	Anix: Anonymous Blackout-Resistant Microblogging with Message Endorsing S. Kamali, D. Barradas [S&P'25]
	Amigo: Secure Group Mesh Messaging in Realistic Protest Settings D. Inyangson, S. Radway, T. M. Jois, J. Mickens, N. Fazio [CCS'25]	Mirage: Private, Mobility-based Routing for Censorship Evasion Z. Ratliff, R. Yang, A. Bai, H. Berger, M. Sherr, J. Mickens [NDSS'26]
Censorship Measurements
Week 11 Censored Topics and Measurement Ethics	Mar 23	Mar 25
	Topics of Controversy: An Empirical Analysis of Web Censorship Lists Z. Weinberg, M. Sharif, J. Szurdi, N. Christin [PoPETs'17]	Can Censorship Measurements Be Safe(r)? B. Jones, N. Feamster [HotNets'15]
	Automatic Generation of Web Censorship Probe Lists J. Tang, L. Alvarez, A. Brar, N. P. Hoang, N. Christin [PoPETs'24]	Forgive Us our SYNs: Technical and Ethical Considerations for Measuring Internet Filtering J. R. Crandall, M. Crete-Nishihata, J. Knockel [NSEthics'15]
Week 12 Planet-scale Measurements	Mar 30	Apr 1
	ICLab: A Global, Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform A. A. Niaki, S. Cho, Z. Weinberg, N. P. Hoang, A. Razaghpanah, N. Christin, P. Gill [S&P'20]	How to Catch when Proxies Lie: Verifying the Physical Locations of Network Proxies with Active Geolocation Z. Weinberg, S. Cho, N. Cristin, V. Sekar, P. Gill [IMC'18]
	Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory R. S. Raman, P. Shenoy, K. Kohls, R. Ensafi [CCS'20]	Network Measurement Methods for Locating and Examining Censorship Devices R. Sundara Raman, M. Wang, J. Dalek, J. Mayer, R. Ensafi [CoNEXT'22]
Project Presentations
Week 13	Apr 6	Apr 8
Final project report due Apr 12 (last day of classes).	Project presentations	Project presentations