Infranet consists of a requester and responder
communicating over a covert tunnel. A requester, running on a user's
computer, uses the tunnel to request censored content. Upon receiving
the request, the responder, a standard public Web server running
Infranet software, retrieves the sought content from the Web and
returns it to the requester via the tunnel.
In the upstream direction, the Infranet tunnel protocol modulates
covert messages on standard HTTP requests for uncensored content.
This is done using a confidentially negotiated function that maps URLs
to message fragments, which compose requests for censored content.
The requester and responder communicate via a channel with far greater
bandwidth from the responder to the requester than vice versa.
Because the responder serves many Infranet users' requests for hidden
content, it can maintain the frequency distribution of hidden
messages. A requester typically wants to send a message from this
distribution.
Software
Work on Infranet is proceeding quickly. To see the latest source code and releases, visit our project page at
Sourceforge.
Papers
-
Infranet: Circumventing Censorship and Surveillance
Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Greg Harfst, Hari Balakrishnan, and David Karger
11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, August 2002.
[Gzipped PostScript
(425K)][PostScript (1.5MB)]
[PDF (450K)]
Awarded Best Student Paper
-
Thwarting Web Cenorship with Untrusted Messenger Discovery
Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Winston Wang, Hari Balakrishnan, and David Karger
3rd Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Dresden, Germany, March 2003.
In the News
Talks
Infranet:Circumventing
Web Censorship and Surveillance
- MIT Applied Security Reading
Group, February 13, 2002. [.ps]
- Carnegie Mellon SDI, April 26,
2002. [.ps]
- HP Labs, August 5,
2002. [.html] [.ps]
- 11th Usenix Security
Symposium, August 8, 2002. [.html] [.ps]
- Harvard Kennedy School, November 27, 2002. [.ps]
[.html]
Thwarting Web Censorship with Untrusted Messenger Discovery
People
Related Articles
- Reuters. China blocks Internet Blogs. MSNBC.com. January 15, 2003.
- R. Collier Iraq shuts down Net access to block U.S. e-mail campaign . San Francisco Chronicle. January 12, 2003.
- J. Kahn. China
Has World's Tightest Internet Censorship,
Study Finds. New York Times. December 4, 2002.
- K. Winstein. China Blocks MIT
Web Addresses. The Tech. November 22, 2002.
- J. Lee. Guerrilla
Warfare, Waged With Code. New York Times. October 10, 2002.
- J. Kahn. China
Toughens Obstacles to Internet Searches. New York Times. September
11, 2002.
- W. Knight. Google
mirror beats Great Firewall of China. New Scientist. September 2, 2002.
- E. Eckholm. ...And Click Here for China. New York Times. August 4, 2002.
- N. Fathi. Taboo Surfing: Click Here for Iran. New York Times. August 4, 2002.
- K. Zetter. Hackers
Tackle Censorship With New Tool. PCWorld. July 12, 2002.
- K. Altintas et al. Censoring
the Internet: The Situation in Turkey. First Monday. June 2002.
- M. Lewis. The
Satellite Subversives. New York Times. February 24, 2002.
- E. Gutmann. Who
Lost China's Internet?. Weekly Standard. February 25, 2002.
- T. Spring Will
Anonymous E-mail become a Casualty of War? PCWorld February
11, 2002.
- China Net
Use Soars BBC News. February 11, 2002.
-
J. Lee.
Companies compete to provide Saudi Internet veil. New York
Times November 19, 2001.
- P. Meller.
Europe
moving toward ban on Internet hate speech New York Times. November 10,
2001.
- I. Sample. China Shuts Out Net News Again. New Scientist. September 27, 2001.
Related Research
Projects
Related Papers
- I. Clarke, O. Sandbert, B. Wiley, and T. Hong.
Freenet: A distributed anonymous information storage and retrieval
system.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and
Unobservability, Berkeley, CA, July 2000.
- R. Dingledine, M. Freedman, and D. Molnar.
The Free Haven Project: Distributed anonymous storage service.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and
Unobservability, Berkeley, CA, July 2000.
- D. Martin and A. Schulman.
Deanonymizing users of the SafeWeb anonymizing service.
In Proc. 11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA,
August 2002.
- M. Waldman and D. Mazières.
Tangler: A censorship-resistant publishing system based on document
entanglements.
In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Computer and
Communications Security, Philadelphia, PA, November 2001.
- M. Waldman, A. Rubin, and L. Cranor.
Publius: A robust, tamper-evident, censorship-resistant, web
publishing system.
In Proc. 9th USENIX Security Symposium, pages 59-72, Denver,
CO, August 2000.
M. I. T. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory · 32 Vassar Street · Cambridge, MA 02139 · USA
