Censorship Resistance as a Side-Effect (Transcript of Discussion)

摘要

This is a thought experiment, which is a euphemism for a half-baked idea, that my wonderful grad student, Henry Tan, and myself have come up with over the last few months. To provide some context, the talk is really about censorship and unblockability, so I'll start by describing what I mean by that. Suppose we have some user, Alice or Bob, and unfortunately he or she is located in some network that is controlled by a censor. So you can imagine, for example, they're in China or Iran, which allows them to access some sites, but there are other sites, like for example, Twitter, which are deemed inappropriate, and therefore are blocked by the censor. So our goal, like much work in censorship and unblockability, is to allow the user in this restricted regime to be able to communicate with whatever website or service he or she is trying to access. In other words, we're trying to make it indistinguishable from the censor's perspective as to where they are going.