Unfettered digital communication, as provided by the Internet, has fundamentally changed the world in countless ways. Businesses, organizations, and citizens have benefited from the Internet's global reach. However, the Internet was not designed to be resilient to censorship, and governments have restricted communication to advance their social and economic agendas. Worse, network equipment providers have shown a willingness to commoditize and profit from censorship by selling interception and filtering devices. The desire for uncensored access to the Internet has motivated the development of techniques such as one-hop proxies and anonymizing networks, but existing techniques have multiple limitations, ranging from low performance and intermittent availability to reduced levels of security and application flexibility. This project will develop and deploy a censorship resistant peer-to-peer system that overcomes the limitations of existing systems and provides unrestricted access to popular web sites and Internet services.
The advent of social networks provides researchers with an opportunity to take a fresh look at peer-to-peer systems for censorship resistance. The focus of this project is to use social trust relations as a foundation for achieving highly secure and blocking resistant overlays for supporting network services, while also approaching the ease of use, performance, and reliability typically associated with direct communications. Specifically, the system will use social overlays wherein participants form a peer-to-peer overlay network bootstrapped based on real-world trust relationships. Participants of the social overlay would be able to directly communicate and share content, without having to expose their actions and without being blocked. A key design choice is also to develop the system to operate completely within a web browser, leveraging newly developed technologies that provide support for peer-to-peer communications inside the browser. Browser-based end-user solutions are easily deployable without requiring significant infrastructural costs. There are several key, interrelated challenges that the system will overcome. Principal among these are: performance, flexibility, trustworthiness, and robustness.
