Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Censorship-resistant and Secure Internet Communications

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In the last few years, the Internet has seen significantly increased deployment of security and privacy technologies offered by websites, messaging applications, and other forms of online communication. However, these currently deployed technologies in the area of privacy-preserving communication only solve part of the problem. Most approaches focus on protecting the contents of a message but reveal the metadata (who communicated with whom, when, and where). Such metadata allows the reconstruction of a person's social network, location, and activities, and by itself can reveal sensitive information such as being part of a minority or marginalized group. Furthermore, protecting communication contents and metadata is of limited utility if the communication itself is censored and the messages are not getting through at all; country-scale Internet censorship is increasingly common around the world, drastically undermining human rights such as freedom of speech.******The original design of the Internet did not account for governmental parties manipulating and censoring communication and hence does not provide adequate mechanisms to guarantee availability: that the Internet services one might wish to use are in fact reachable. Similarly, the abundance of sensitive highly personal information that is currently shared digitally is not adequately protected. Adversaries, ranging from petty criminals to governmental censors, are able to observe and manipulate Internet communication. Such surveillance and manipulation affects both individuals, for instance due to leaked personal information, as well as societies, for instance due to country-wide censorship. It is therefore essential to develop technologies to resist surveillance and censorship.******Unfortunately, manually designing and evaluating privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for secure and censorship-resistant communication is cumbersome and notoriously difficult to perform perfectly. Moreover, a single design flaw can lead to catastrophic real-world consequences for users. By enabling automated protocol construction and verification, we will ensure future research on PETs will be more efficient and have lower risk for errors.******The long-term goal of our research is to develop original and innovative PETs that overcome the limitations of the existing state-of-the-art approaches and provide more extensive protection from surveillance and censorship. In light of the above discussion, we identified three short-term goals: i) protecting communication metadata, ii) automated protocol construction, and iii) censorship-resistant Internet access. Our PETs for secure and censorship-resistant communication address all three traditional aspects of security: confidentiality, integrity, and availability. In addition to advancing scientific knowledge, we focus on deploying our systems to benefit users all over the world.