SEnD: A Social Network Friendship Enhanced Decentralized System to Circumvent Censorships

• Published in: IEEE transactions on services computing Vol. 15; no. 1; pp. 346 - 360
• Main Authors: Ding, Ding, Jeong, Kyuho, Xing, Shuning, Conti, Mauro, Figueiredo, Renato, Liu, Fangai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.01.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Censorship; communications; Datasets; Distributed computing; distributed system; Information integrity; Internet; IP (Internet Protocol); IP networks; Peer-to-peer computing; Servers; social network; Social networking (online); Social networks; Virtual private networks; Web services; China
• ISSN: 1939-1374; 2372-0204
• DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2019.2942598

While the Internet is open by design, it is still the case that users can be subject to censorship by governments or enterprises in accessing Web services and data. In this paper we propose SEnD, a fully-distributed censorship circumvention system built upon an overlay, where users have peer-to-peer virtual private IP tunnels to proxies within their social network. With SEnD, users in an uncensored area can act as proxy servers for their social friends in a censored area, allowing them to bypass the censorship. SEnD is able to outperform the current censorship techniques, such as IP address blocking and active probing attacks. We assessed the effectiveness of SEnD through extensive simulations based on a synthetic dataset, as well as experiments based on a prototype implementation. We built our synthetic dataset based on parameters obtained from questionnaires administered both inside and outside China (we consider China as a case study of censorship area). The results show that SEnD is feasible, efficient and scalable. For example, when the proportion of concurrent active users is less than 60, 99.9 percent of these users are able to find proxy servers.