TY - GEN
T1 - Automated detection and fingerprinting of censorship block pages
AU - Jones, Ben
AU - Lee, Tzu Wen
AU - Feamster, Nick
AU - Gill, Phillipa
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2014 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).
PY - 2014/11/5
Y1 - 2014/11/5
N2 - One means of enforcing Web censorship is to return a block page, which informs the user that an attempt to access a webpage is unsuccessful. Detecting block pages can provide a more complete picture of Web censorship, but automatically identifying block pages is difficult because Web content is dynamic, personalized, and may even be in different languages. Previous work has manually detected and identified block pages, which is difficult to reproduce; it is also time-consuming, which makes it difficult to perform continuous, longitudinal studies of censorship. This paper presents an automated method both to detect block pages and to fingerprint the filtering products that generate them. Our automated method enables continuous measurements of block pages; we found that our methods successfully detect 95% of block pages and identify five filtering tools, including a tool that had not been previously identified "in the wild".
AB - One means of enforcing Web censorship is to return a block page, which informs the user that an attempt to access a webpage is unsuccessful. Detecting block pages can provide a more complete picture of Web censorship, but automatically identifying block pages is difficult because Web content is dynamic, personalized, and may even be in different languages. Previous work has manually detected and identified block pages, which is difficult to reproduce; it is also time-consuming, which makes it difficult to perform continuous, longitudinal studies of censorship. This paper presents an automated method both to detect block pages and to fingerprint the filtering products that generate them. Our automated method enables continuous measurements of block pages; we found that our methods successfully detect 95% of block pages and identify five filtering tools, including a tool that had not been previously identified "in the wild".
KW - Censorship
KW - Internet measurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84910110427&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84910110427&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2663716.2663722
DO - 10.1145/2663716.2663722
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84910110427
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 299
EP - 304
BT - IMC 2014 - Proceedings of the 2014 ACM
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2014 ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2014
Y2 - 5 November 2014 through 7 November 2014
ER -