SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Studying the Impact of IPv6 on Information Controls and Censorship Circumvention

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Deployment of the IPv6 standard has seen a rapid increase in the past decade with Google currently measuring 25-30% of their traffic being served over native IPv6 connections, 25% of all Internet-connected networks advertising IPv6 connectivity, and major mobile networks such as T-Mobile embracing the standard. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for censorship circumvention tool developers and researchers to measure how IPv6 deployments are impacting online information control systems, and how the emergence of IPv6 could enable novel circumvention techniques to augment existing tools. The overall objective in this project is to develop measurement methodologies to track IPv6-specific information control deployments and develop new circumvention strategies which leverage features of the IPv6 deployment and protocol. The research can have wide reaching near and long term impact in terms of facilitating free and open communication over the Internet. The project makes the following technical contributions. First, the project measures how information controls deployments are modified to handle IPv6 traffic. The project seeks to understand how IPv6 is handled by information controls deployments. To this end, the investigators explore two directions: updating existing IPv4-specific measurement techniques and platforms to make them IPv6-capable and developing new measurement techniques utilizing the IPv6 protocol to improve information controls measurement capabilities. Second, the project designs schemes that leverage the IPv6 protocol to bypass online censors in the short- and long-term. The goal is to understand how the IPv6 protocol can aid censorship circumvention. To this end, the researchers explore three directions: (1) making short-term gains against censors by leveraging IPv6 transition technologies, (2) advancing the state of Refraction Networking technologies by using IPv6, and (3) developing clean slate IPv6 based circumvention tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.