arXiv subjects

Rumaisa Habib

Publications and source records attributed to Rumaisa Habib.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Understanding the "Airport" Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem in China

In China, a burgeoning underground market sells citizens subscription-based censorship circumvention proxies known as ''airports''. We present the first systematic study of this ecosystem, combining user surveys, social media analysis, and active network measurements. We find that airports are by far the most popular off-the-shelf censorship circumvention tool in China, used by over half of our 1,667~survey respondents, who cite their ease of use, performance, and access to geo-restricted services like ChatGPT and Netflix. By scanning the Internet and scraping Telegram announcement channels, we identify 3,431 active airports built on a handful of open-source toolkits. We subscribe to 35 airports and characterize their performance, which often surpasses direct connections through the Great Firewall due to a distinctive multi-hop architecture. However, airports also pose new challenges and security risks: they accept payment through commercial services like Alipay, suffer frequent government takedowns, and are difficult for clients to configure optimally. Many airports also deploy their own distinct censorship policies. Airports are far more widely used than other circumvention tools from the academic literature, but introduce new forms of fragility and control, offering both lessons and opportunities for future circumvention research.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

On the Centralization and Regionalization of the Web

Over the past decade, Internet centralization and its implications for both people and the resilience of the Internet has become a topic of active debate. While the networking community informally agrees on the definition of centralization, we lack a formal metric for quantifying centralization, which limits research beyond descriptive analysis. In this work, we introduce a statistical measure for Internet centralization, which we use to better understand how the web is centralized across four layers of web infrastructure (hosting providers, DNS infrastructure, TLDs, and certificate authorities) in 150~countries. Our work uncovers significant geographical variation, as well as a complex interplay between centralization and sociopolitically driven regionalization. We hope that our work can serve as the foundation for more nuanced analysis to inform this important debate.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2024

VaulTor: Putting the TEE in Tor

Online services that desire to operate anonymously routinely host themselves as 'Hidden Services' in the Tor network. However, these services are frequently threatened by deanonymization attacks, whereby their IP address and location may be inferred by the authorities. We present VaulTor, a novel architecture for the Tor network to ensure an extra layer of security for the Hidden Services against deanonymization attacks. In this new architecture, a volunteer (vault) is incentivized to host the web application content on behalf of the Hidden Service. The vault runs the hosted application in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) and becomes the point of contact for interested clients. This setup can substantially reduce the uptime requirement of the original Hidden Service provider and hence significantly decrease the chance of deanonymization attacks against them. We also show that the VaulTor architecture does not cause any noticeable performance degradation in accessing the hosted content (the performance degradation ranges from 2.6-5.5%).

cs.CR↗