Seminars and Events

Cybersecurity Seminar Series

Putting Internet Censorship to Rest: The Need for Testbeds in Internet Censorship Research

Event Details

Abstract:

Internet censorship plagues many countries across the world, including China, Iran, Russia, and even the EU. In response to such attacks against user freedom, the censorship research community has collectively developed systems to measure and circumvent Internet censorship wherever it occurs. As a result of the constant cat-and-mouse war between this community and the censors, the developers of circumvention and measurement systems face numerous challenges. In this talk, Jade will present CensorLab: an emulation platform for censorship-related experimentation that aims to address these problems. Jade will also discuss their work integrating CensorLab into the SPHERE testbed and future research directions enabled by CensorLab and SPHERE. Finally, Jade will discuss some preliminary work with SPHERE promoting research reproducibility with NixOS, a declarative operating system.

Speaker Bio

Jade is a PhD student at SPIN: the Secure, Private Internet research group led by Amir Houmansadr at University of Massachusetts Amherst researching Internet censorship, automated protocol classification, and network protocol fuzzing. Their primary project is CensorLab, an emulation framework for performing censorship experimentation in a controlled environment. In addition to Internet censorship research, Jade is passionate about reproducible software in research and beyond.

ISI Host: David Balenson, Networking & Cybersecurity Division Interim Director

Note: The seminar talk will be virtual only. Thank you.