Infranet (original) (raw)

Infranet consists of a requester and _responder_communicating over a covert tunnel. A requester, running on a user's computer, uses the tunnel to request censored content. Upon receiving the request, the responder, a standard public Web server running Infranet software, retrieves the sought content from the Web and returns it to the requester via the tunnel. In the upstream direction, the Infranet tunnel protocol modulates covert messages on standard HTTP requests for uncensored content. This is done using a confidentially negotiated function that maps URLs to message fragments, which compose requests for censored content. The requester and responder communicate via a channel with far greater bandwidth from the responder to the requester than vice versa. Because the responder serves many Infranet users' requests for hidden content, it can maintain the frequency distribution of hidden messages. A requester typically wants to send a message from this distribution.

Software

Work on Infranet is proceeding quickly. To see the latest source code and releases, visit our project page at Sourceforge.

Papers

• Infranet: Circumventing Censorship and Surveillance
  Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Greg Harfst, Hari Balakrishnan, and David Karger
  11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, August 2002.
  [Gzipped PostScript(425K)][PostScript (1.5MB)] [PDF (450K)]
  Awarded Best Student Paper
• Thwarting Web Cenorship with Untrusted Messenger Discovery
  Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Winston Wang, Hari Balakrishnan, and David Karger
  3rd Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Dresden, Germany, March 2003.

In the News

• T. Bowen. Scheme hides Web access. TRN Magazine. October 2, 2002.
• Slashdot. Infranet: Circumventing Web Censorship. August 20, 2002. [.jpg]
• F. Rotzer. Noch ein Programm zum Umgehen von Internetzensur und �berwachung. Telepolis. July 23, 2002.
• W. Smith. Web "camouflage" aims to beat censors . New Scientist. July 22, 2002.

Talks

• Infranet:Circumventing Web Censorship and Surveillance
• MIT Applied Security Reading Group, February 13, 2002. [.ps]
• Carnegie Mellon SDI, April 26, 2002. [.ps]
• HP Labs, August 5, 2002. [.html] [.ps]
• 11th Usenix Security Symposium, August 8, 2002. [.html] [.ps]
• Harvard Kennedy School, November 27, 2002. [.ps] [.html]
• Thwarting Web Censorship with Untrusted Messenger Discovery
• MIT Applied Security Reading Group, February 27, 2003. [.ps]

People

Faculty: Hari Balakrishnan David Karger

Graduate Students: Nick Feamster Magdalena Balazinska Winston Wang Greg Harfst

Related Articles

• Reuters. China blocks Internet Blogs. MSNBC.com. January 15, 2003.
• R. Collier Iraq shuts down Net access to block U.S. e-mail campaign . San Francisco Chronicle. January 12, 2003.
• J. Kahn. China Has World's Tightest Internet Censorship, Study Finds. New York Times. December 4, 2002.
• K. Winstein. China Blocks MIT Web Addresses. The Tech. November 22, 2002.
• J. Lee. Guerrilla Warfare, Waged With Code. New York Times. October 10, 2002.
• J. Kahn. China Toughens Obstacles to Internet Searches. New York Times. September 11, 2002.
• W. Knight. Google mirror beats Great Firewall of China. New Scientist. September 2, 2002.
• E. Eckholm. ...And Click Here for China. New York Times. August 4, 2002.
• N. Fathi. Taboo Surfing: Click Here for Iran. New York Times. August 4, 2002.
• K. Zetter. Hackers Tackle Censorship With New Tool. PCWorld. July 12, 2002.
• K. Altintas et al. Censoring the Internet: The Situation in Turkey. First Monday. June 2002.
• M. Lewis. The Satellite Subversives. New York Times. February 24, 2002.
• E. Gutmann. Who Lost China's Internet?. Weekly Standard. February 25, 2002.
• T. Spring Will Anonymous E-mail become a Casualty of War? PCWorld February 11, 2002.
• China Net Use Soars BBC News. February 11, 2002.
• J. Lee. Companies compete to provide Saudi Internet veil. New York Times November 19, 2001.
• P. Meller.Europe moving toward ban on Internet hate speech New York Times. November 10, 2001.
• I. Sample. China Shuts Out Net News Again. New Scientist. September 27, 2001.

Related Research

Projects

• Real-time testing of Internet filtering in China
• The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc). Peekabooty.http://www-peek-a-booty.org.
• Censorware. http://censorware.net/
• Outguess.http://www.outguess.org/.
• SafeWeb.http://www.safeweb.com/.
• Stunnel-universal SSL wrapper.http://www.stunnel.org/.
• Zero-Knowledge Systems. Freedom WebSecure.http://www.freedom.net /products/websecure/.
• Voice of America.http://www.voa.gov/.

  Related Papers

• I. Clarke, O. Sandbert, B. Wiley, and T. Hong. Freenet: A distributed anonymous information storage and retrieval system. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability, Berkeley, CA, July 2000.
• R. Dingledine, M. Freedman, and D. Molnar. The Free Haven Project: Distributed anonymous storage service. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability, Berkeley, CA, July 2000.
• D. Martin and A. Schulman. Deanonymizing users of the SafeWeb anonymizing service. In Proc. 11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, August 2002.
• M. Waldman and D. Mazières. Tangler: A censorship-resistant publishing system based on document entanglements. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Philadelphia, PA, November 2001.
• M. Waldman, A. Rubin, and L. Cranor. Publius: A robust, tamper-evident, censorship-resistant, web publishing system. In Proc. 9th USENIX Security Symposium, pages 59-72, Denver, CO, August 2000.