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Automated Detection and Fingerprinting of Censorship Block Pages

Published: 05 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

One means of enforcing Web censorship is to return a block page, which informs the user that an attempt to access a webpage is unsuccessful. Detecting block pages can provide a more complete picture of Web censorship, but automatically identifying block pages is difficult because Web content is dynamic, personalized, and may even be in different languages. Previous work has manually detected and identified block pages, which is difficult to reproduce; it is also time-consuming, which makes it difficult to perform continuous, longitudinal studies of censorship. This paper presents an automated method both to detect block pages and to fingerprint the filtering products that generate them. Our automated method enables continuous measurements of block pages; we found that our methods successfully detect 95% of block pages and identify five filtering tools, including a tool that had not been previously identified "in the wild".

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IMC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Internet Measurement Conference
      November 2014
      524 pages
      ISBN:9781450332132
      DOI:10.1145/2663716
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Publication History

      Published: 05 November 2014

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      Author Tags

      1. censorship
      2. internet measurement

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      IMC '14: Internet Measurement Conference
      November 5 - 7, 2014
      BC, Vancouver, Canada

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      IMC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 103 submissions, 31%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 277 of 1,083 submissions, 26%

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      • (2023)Network responses to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Conference on Security Symposium10.5555/3620237.3620382(2581-2598)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2023
      • (2023)POSTER: A Cyberspace Study of the Russia-Ukraine WarProceedings of the 2023 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3579856.3592822(1016-1018)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
      • (2023)MENDER: Multi-level Feature Fusion Discovery Framework for Exposed ICS Remote Management Devices in the Wild2023 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom60117.2023.00160(1173-1180)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
      • (2022)In-Depth Evaluation of the Impact of National-Level DNS Filtering on DNS Resolvers over Space and TimeElectronics10.3390/electronics1108127611:8(1276)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2022
      • (2022)TSPUProceedings of the 22nd ACM Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3517745.3561461(179-194)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2022
      • (2022)SEnD: A Social Network Friendship Enhanced Decentralized System to Circumvent CensorshipsIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2019.294259815:1(346-360)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2022
      • (2022)Measuring the Accessibility of Domain Name Encryption and Its Impact on Internet FilteringPassive and Active Measurement10.1007/978-3-030-98785-5_23(518-536)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
      • (2020)Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship ObservatoryProceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/3372297.3417883(49-66)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
      • (2020)Apophanies or Epiphanies? How Crawlers Impact Our Understanding of the WebProceedings of The Web Conference 202010.1145/3366423.3380113(271-280)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
      • (2020)ICLab: A Global, Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40000.2020.00014(135-151)Online publication date: May-2020
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