Measuring and Circumventing Emerging Internet Censorship Threats

Censorship silently shapes the beliefs, behaviors, and opportunities of billions. The threat is accelerating: a government-industry censorship complex is emerging, developing and exporting AI-driven surveillance and filtering infrastructure with profound consequences for the Internet and society worldwide.

In this talk, I examine two major censorship upgrades in China: new mechanisms for blocking fully encrypted traffic and for filtering QUIC traffic at scale. I conduct large-scale empirical measurements to model these emerging threats, characterizing their operational logic, identifying technical flaws, and assessing the security and privacy risks they introduce to both domestic and global Internet users. This analysis also reveals the incentives and organizational constraints that shape censor behavior. I then translate research insights into real-world deployments. My circumvention strategies have been enabled by default in major network libraries, Chrome, Firefox, and major circumvention tools, reaching hundreds of millions of users.

Censorship resistance should be a fundamental property of the internet. Achieving this requires more than technical solutions: it demands a multidisciplinary approach that addresses the misaligned incentives of users, developers, operators, funders, and policymakers. By understanding the motivations and constraints of every stakeholder, we can build the shared trust infrastructure necessary to outpace an increasingly sophisticated adversary.

This lecture will also be live streamed via Zoom. You are welcome to join us either in South Hall or online.

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