Monitoring internet censorship with UBICA

Giuseppe Aceto, Alessio Botta, Antonio Pescapè, Nick Feamster, M. Faheem Awan, Tahir Ahmad, Saad Qaisar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Censorship is becoming increasingly pervasive on the Internet, with the Open Net Initiative reporting nearly 50 countries practicing some form of censorship. Previous work has reported the existence ofmany forms of Internet censorship (e.g., DNS tampering, packet filtering, connection reset, content filtering), each of which may be composed to build a more comprehensive censorship system. Automated monitoring of censorship represents an important and challenging research problem, due to the continually evolving nature of the content that is censored and the means by which censorship is implemented. UBICA, User-based Internet Censorship Analysis, is a platform we implemented to solve this task leveraging crowdsourced data collection. By adopting an integrated and multi-step analysis, UBICA provides simple but effective means of revealing censorship events over time. UBICA has revealed the effect of several censorship techniques including DNS tampering and content filtering. Using UBICA, we demonstrate evidence of censorship in several selected countries (Italy, Pakistan, and South Korea), for which we obtained help from local users and manually validated the automated analysis.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationTraffic Monitoring and Analysis - 7th International Workshop, TMA 2015, Proceedings
EditorsPere Barlet-Ros, Olivier Bonaventure, Moritz Steiner
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages143-157
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9783319171715
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Event7th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis, TMA 2015 - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: Apr 21 2015Apr 24 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9053
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Other

Other7th International Workshop on Traffic Monitoring and Analysis, TMA 2015
Country/TerritorySpain
CityBarcelona
Period4/21/154/24/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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