CacheBrowser: Bypassing Chinese Censorship without Proxies Using Cached Content

The cached Internet content served by content delivery networks (CDN) comprises a large fraction of today's Internet traffic, yet, there is little study on how real-world censors deal with blocking forbidden CDN-hosted Internet content. We investigate the techniques used by the Great Firewall of China to block CDN-hosted content, and demonstrate that blocking CDN content poses unique technical and non-technical challenges to the censors. We therefore design a client-side circumvention system, CacheBrowser, that leverages the censors' difficulties in blocking CDN content. We implement CacheBrowser and use it to unblock CDN-hosted content in China with a download latency significantly smaller than traditional proxy-based circumvention systems like Tor. CacheBrowser's superior quality-of-service is thanks to its publisher-centric approach, which retrieves blocked content directly from content publishers with no use of third-party proxies.

[1]  J. Boyan.  DATA AND INFORMATION COLLECTION ON THE NET The Anonymizer Protecting User Privacy on the Web , 1997 .

[2]  David E. Culler,et al.  PlanetLab: an overlay testbed for broad-coverage services , 2003, CCRV.

[3]  Nick Mathewson,et al.  Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router , 2004, USENIX Security Symposium.

[4]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  A Taxonomy and Survey of Content Delivery Networks , 2006 .

[5]  R. Dingledine,et al.  Design of a blocking-resistant anonymity system , 2006 .

[6]  Rajkumar Buyya,et al.  Content Delivery Networks , 2008 .

[7]  Maurizio Dusi,et al.  Tunnel Hunter: Detecting application-layer tunnels with statistical fingerprinting , 2009, Comput. Networks.

[8]  Weijia Jia,et al.  A new cell counter based attack against tor , 2009, CCS.

[9]  Hannes Federrath,et al.  Website fingerprinting: attacking popular privacy enhancing technologies with the multinomial naïve-bayes classifier , 2009, CCSW '09.

[10]  Roger Dingledine,et al.  A Practical Congestion Attack on Tor Using Long Paths , 2009, USENIX Security Symposium.

[11]  Ramesh K. Sitaraman,et al.  The Akamai network: a platform for high-performance internet applications , 2010, OPSR.

[12]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  Cirripede: circumvention infrastructure using router redirection with plausible deniability , 2011, CCS '11.

[13]  Srinivasan Seshan,et al.  XIA: an architecture for an evolvable and trustworthy internet , 2011, HotNets-X.

[14]  Ian Goldberg,et al.  Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure , 2011, USENIX Security Symposium.

[15]  Karl Kathuria.  Bypassing Internet Censorship for News Broadcasters , 2011, FOCI.

[16]  C. Leberknight.  A Taxonomy of Internet Censorship and Anti-Censorship Draft Version December 31 , 2010 , 2011 .

[17]  P. Cochat,et al.  Et al , 2008, Archives de pediatrie : organe officiel de la Societe francaise de pediatrie.

[18]  Neo,et al.  The collateral damage of internet censorship by DNS injection , 2012, Comput. Commun. Rev..

[19]  Brijesh Joshi,et al.  Touching from a distance: website fingerprinting attacks and defenses , 2012, CCS.

[20]  Daniel Anderson,et al.  Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China , 2012 .

[21]  Arun Venkataramani,et al.  MobilityFirst: a robust and trustworthy mobility-centric architecture for the future internet , 2012, MOCO.

[22]  Stefan Lindskog,et al.  How the Great Firewall of China is Blocking Tor , 2012, FOCI.

[23]  Vitaly Shmatikov,et al.  The Parrot Is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications , 2013, 2013 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[24]  Giovanni Bartolomeo,et al.  Named Data Networking Project , 2013 .

[25]  Nicholas Hopper,et al.  Cover your ACKs: pitfalls of covert channel censorship circumvention , 2013, CCS.

[26]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  I want my voice to be heard: IP over Voice-over-IP for unobservable censorship circumvention , 2013, NDSS.

[27]  Rachel Greenstadt,et al.  A Critical Evaluation of Website Fingerprinting Attacks , 2014, CCS.

[28]  Vitaly Shmatikov,et al.  CloudTransport: Using Cloud Storage for Censorship-Resistant Networking , 2014, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[29]  Vern Paxson,et al.  Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting , 2015, Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol..

[30]  Nikita Borisov,et al.  SWEET: Serving the Web by Exploiting Email Tunnels , 2012, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.