Session 1A: Anonymous Routing and Censorship CCS '20, November 9–13, 2020, Virtual Event, USA Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory Ram Sundara Raman, Prerana Shenoy, Katharina Kohls∗, Roya Ensafi University of Michigan, ∗Ruhr University Bochum {ramaks, pbshenoy, ensafi}@umich.edu,∗
[email protected] ABSTRACT 1 INTRODUCTION Remote censorship measurement techniques offer capabilities for The Internet Freedom community’s understanding of the current monitoring Internet reachability around the world. However, op- state and global scope of censorship remains limited: most work erating these techniques continuously is labor-intensive and re- has focused on the practices of particular countries, or on the reach- quires specialized knowledge and synchronization, leading to lim- ability of limited sets of online services from a small number of ited adoption. In this paper, we introduce Censored Planet, an online volunteers. Creating a global, data-driven view of censorship is a censorship measurement platform that collects and analyzes mea- challenging proposition, since practices are intentionally opaque, surements from ongoing deployments of four remote measurement censorship mechanisms may vary, and there are numerous loca- techniques (Augur, Satellite/Iris, Quack, and Hyperquack). Cen- tions where disruptions can occur. Moreover, the behavior of the sored Planet adopts a modular design that supports synchronized network can vary depending on who is requesting content from baseline measurements on six Internet protocols as well as cus- which location. tomized measurements that target specific countries and websites. Established efforts to measure censorship globally utilize dis- Censored Planet has already collected and published more than tributed deployments or volunteer networks of end-user devices [7, 21.8 billion data points of longitudinal network observations over 104].