New Anti-censorship Scheme Could Make İt İmpossible To Block İndividual Sites

A radical new approach to thwarting Internet censorship would essentially turn the whole web into a proxy server, making it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites. The system is called Telex, and it is the brainchild of computer science researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada. They will present it Aug. 12 at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco.

"This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication," said J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at U-M and one of Telex's developers.

"The Internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services. Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information."

Today's typical anticensorship schemes get users around site blocks by routing them through an outside server called a proxy. But the censor can monitor the content of traffic on the whole network, and eventually finds and blocks the proxy, too.

"It creates a kind of cat and mouse game," said Halderman, who was at the blackboard explaining this to his computer and network security class when it hit him that there might be a different approach -- a bigger way to think about the problem.

Here's how Telex would work:

Users install Telex software. Halderman envisions they could download it from an intermittently available website or borrow a copy from a friend.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) outside the censoring nation deploy equipment called Telex stations.