CSR: Small: Towards Blocking Resistant Network Services

互联网提供的不受限制的数字通信从根本上以无数方式改变了世界。企业、组织和公民都受益于互联网的全球覆盖。 然而，互联网的设计并不是为了抵御审查，各国政府限制通信以推进其社会和经济议程。更糟糕的是，网络设备提供商已经表现出通过出售拦截和过滤设备来商品化审查并从中获利的意愿。 对不受审查地访问互联网的期望促使了诸如单跳代理和匿名网络之类的技术的发展，但是现有技术具有多种限制，从低性能和间歇性可用性到降低的安全性和应用灵活性级别。 该项目将开发和部署一个抗审查的对等系统，克服现有系统的局限性，提供对流行网站和互联网服务的不受限制的访问。 社交网络的出现为研究人员提供了一个机会，以重新审视点对点系统的审查阻力。该项目的重点是使用社会信任关系作为实现高度安全和抗阻塞覆盖的基础，以支持网络服务，同时还接近通常与直接通信相关的易用性，性能和可靠性。 具体而言，该系统将使用社交覆盖，其中参与者形成基于真实世界信任关系引导的对等覆盖网络。 社交覆盖的参与者将能够直接交流和分享内容，而不必暴露他们的行为，也不会被阻止。 一个关键的设计选择也是开发系统完全在Web浏览器中运行，利用新开发的技术，为浏览器内部的对等通信提供支持。 基于浏览器的最终用户解决方案易于部署，无需大量的基础设施成本。 该系统将克服若干关键的、相互关联的挑战。 其中主要的是：性能，灵活性，可信度和鲁棒性。

Unfettered digital communication, as provided by the Internet, has fundamentally changed the world in countless ways. Businesses, organizations, and citizens have benefited from the Internet's global reach. However, the Internet was not designed to be resilient to censorship, and governments have restricted communication to advance their social and economic agendas. Worse, network equipment providers have shown a willingness to commoditize and profit from censorship by selling interception and filtering devices. The desire for uncensored access to the Internet has motivated the development of techniques such as one-hop proxies and anonymizing networks, but existing techniques have multiple limitations, ranging from low performance and intermittent availability to reduced levels of security and application flexibility. This project will develop and deploy a censorship resistant peer-to-peer system that overcomes the limitations of existing systems and provides unrestricted access to popular web sites and Internet services. The advent of social networks provides researchers with an opportunity to take a fresh look at peer-to-peer systems for censorship resistance. The focus of this project is to use social trust relations as a foundation for achieving highly secure and blocking resistant overlays for supporting network services, while also approaching the ease of use, performance, and reliability typically associated with direct communications. Specifically, the system will use social overlays wherein participants form a peer-to-peer overlay network bootstrapped based on real-world trust relationships. Participants of the social overlay would be able to directly communicate and share content, without having to expose their actions and without being blocked. A key design choice is also to develop the system to operate completely within a web browser, leveraging newly developed technologies that provide support for peer-to-peer communications inside the browser. Browser-based end-user solutions are easily deployable without requiring significant infrastructural costs. There are several key, interrelated challenges that the system will overcome. Principal among these are: performance, flexibility, trustworthiness, and robustness.