Telex: an infrastructure-level response to state Internet censorship

J. Alex Halderman and his colleagues have unveiled Telex, a "state-level response to state-level censorship." It's a network of censorship-busting major ISPs that provide infrastructure-level, hard-to-detect proxying that allows people in repressive regimes to get access to sites blocked by their national firewalls. The descriptive materials on the site are very easy to grasp and very exciting.

* Telex operates in the network infrastructure -- at any ISP between the censor's network and non-blocked portions of the Internet -- rather than at network end points. This approach, which we call "end-to-middle" proxying, can make the system robust against countermeasures (such as blocking) by the censor.

* Telex focuses on avoiding detection by the censor. That is, it allows a user to circumvent a censor without alerting the censor to the act of circumvention. It complements anonymizing services like Tor (which focus on hiding with whom the user is attempting to communicate instead of that that the user is attempting to have an anonymous conversation) rather than replacing them.

* Telex employs a form of deep-packet inspection -- a technology sometimes used to censor communication -- and repurposes it to circumvent censorship.

* Other systems require distributing secrets, such as encryption keys or IP addresses, to individual users. If the censor discovers these secrets, it can block the system. With Telex, there are no secrets that need to be communicated to users in advance, only the publicly available client software.

* Telex can provide a state-level response to state-level censorship. We envision that friendly countries would create incentives for ISPs to deploy Telex.

Telex.cc

Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure (announcement)

• [Seegras]

  They chose their name very badly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telex

  • [enkiv2]

    It can’t be accidental. Telex is anything but obscure, and is even in the title of a popular Radiohead song.

• [Anonymous]

  But can I use it to get the BBC iPlayer in the US?

• [Anonymous]

  This is an arm race in the wrong direction. An appropriate effort would result in legislation that removes censorship from the internet and has states protecting net neutrality and serving the public’s interest vs. the IP-conquistador-corporations’.

  If we lose the battle in legislation, then we have lost the battle. The government has the most powerful force for oppression in the world. It will sooner or later be used on us, to “protect us” from those who disobey oppressive, inhumane legislation.

• [thebelgianpanda]

  Another potential flaw

  * Censoring government, who we’ll call Bob, gets copy of the freely available client
  * Bob sends a request for a blocked site with the telex public key (in the https nonce from the documentation), but uses loose source routing to force the packet through specific ISP’s
  * Based on the response, it is possible for Bob to map which network segments have Telex servers
  * Armed with this knowledge, Bob can either modify their citizens connections to avoid these areas (similar to what telex is doing), or simply block them.

  Classic example of an arms race, let’s hope the bad guys don’t think of this. Still, serious kudos to the Telex folks.

• [thebelgianpanda]

  I read through the information I could atm, and this is quite interesting. The two biggest stumbling blocks are a) finding friendly ISP’s–and enough of them–and b) if the censoring government can convince AV companies to add signatures then the client could be detected. And ‘b)’ ain’t tinfoil hat material, national interest absolutely do influence what is and isn’t detected in the AV world.

  • [Jack]

    Well, isn’t the larger problem the same as—let‘s say—Amazon, Yelp & Zappos trying to police their reviews for shills? If you have a large enough human-based force that defeats equality based efforts, then you can’t do much.

    That analogy is not 100% perfect, but it seems like oppressive regimes will just cut off any open access if sufficiently threatened. So how will this make it easier? Much in the same way someone can post an honest review on Amazon to only have it crowd-spammed by some marketing department farm of meat-puppets drowing out that one voice.

    • [turn_self_off]

      I think it has been claimed that China have such a force of “shills” that insert FUD into forum threads regarding topics they do not approve off.

      I appears that such approaches are much more effective then similar ones from say the 60s and physical groups.

      • [travtastic]

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

• [scotchmi_st]

  This sounds great, but since I live in a country where most of the major ISPs are going the other way, and screwing-over the enduser further and further, who are these ISPs going to be that will run the Telex services exactly? Does this circumvent the DE bill, here in the UK?

• [Anonymous]

  By “restrictive regimes”, I take it you’re including the UK, USA, Australia, etc?

  How can we criticize the regimes in other countries when our own governments want to emulate them?

  And how can we save the Internet when our governments want to kill it?