Anonymity
Censorship Resistance Revisited
Ginger Perng1, Michael K. Reiter1 and Chenxi Wang1
| (1) |
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, USA |
Abstract
“Censorship resistant” systems attempt to prevent censors from imposing a particular distribution of content across a system.
In this paper, we introduce a variation of censorship resistance (CR) that is resistant to selective filtering even by a censor
who is able to inspect (but not alter) the internal contents and computations of each data server, excluding only the server’s
private signature key. This models a service provided by operators who do not hide their identities from censors. Even with
such a strong adversarial model, our definition states that CR is only achieved if the censor must disable the entire system
to filter selected content. We show that existing censorship resistant systems fail to meet this definition; that Private
Information Retrieval (PIR) is necessary, though not sufficient, to achieve our definition of CR; and that CR is achieved
through a modification of PIR for which known implementations exist.
This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grant No. 0208853 and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.