Censorship-Resilient Communications through Information Scattering (Transcript of Discussion)

Abstract

The problem that we are trying to address is to have an anonymous and censorship-resilient communication, and we know that these kinds of communications are important. We had different talks here yesterday about anonymity, for example, how to improve the anonymity of Tor, but anonymity is not the only the important factor, because in many scenarios what happens is that there is also a censorship authority that can ban the message; there is no point being anonymous if the message is not conveyed to the intended set of recipients. We have a different motivational example, of course there is nothing political around this example, but just to motivate that we know that in many situations it is necessary to have a mechanism to communicate in an anonymous way, and to have a mechanism to avoid that a censorship authority can then ban our message. Here we have a censorship authority that is basically a government, but I saw that there is another paper this afternoon on censorship of eBooks, and in that example the censorship is not by a government. So in many scenarios what happens is that we need to communicate in an anonymous way, and we need to let the message reach the destination without being banned.