Tor’s Usability for Censorship Circumvention

Tor has grown beyond its original purpose as and has since become an important Internet circumvention tool. We specifically examine it usability as a censorship circumvention tool, an essential facet for adoption and use. We focus our analysis on the connection configuration dialog of Tor browser, as censorship circumvention requires correct transport configurations. Our talk will describe a future study aimed at evaluating if and how easily users can circumvent censorship using Tor Browser, isolating specific browser features to study in the process. To this end, we will conduct a large-scale user study examining hundreds of users on how they navigate Tor’s configuration wizard to complete seven browsing tasks in three different adversarial settings. We solicit feedback to improve our study’s design.