Freeweb: P2P-Assisted Collaborative Censorship-Resistant Web Browsing

Abstract

In many countries, the Internet is under stringent censorship for political or religious reasons which severely undermines the free flow of information. A censorship-resistant web browsing system must be scalable, blocking resistant, and tracing resistant. However, current censorship-resistant web browsing systems, which use a group of dedicated proxies to bypass censorship, fail to meet these requirements. To tackle these challenges, we propose Freeweb, which relies on widely-distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) nodes in a decentralized manner rather than specified proxies in a centralized manner. We also proposed enhancement methods to reduce file access delay and avoid node overloads in Freeweb. Freeweb is built on top of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based P2P network, where nodes not under censorship help nodes under censorship to access blocked webpages. Freeweb has a web browser front-end whose user interface resembles existing web browsers. The underlying complex process of retrieving blocked webpages is therefore hidden from users. We implemented an open-sourced Freeweb and conducted extensive real-world experiments on PlanetLab. The experimental results show that Freeweb has a high success rate and reasonable browsing latency, and its enhancement reduces much network load and file access latency, and avoids node overloads.