Blocking-Resistant Network Services
The desire for uncensored access to the Internet has motivated the development of both open proxies like Tor and social graph-based overlays like FreeNet. However, neither design is sufficient, as relays in open proxies are easily exposed and blocked, and overlays based just on social trust suffer from poor availability and performance. We introduce the design for a new overlay service, Unblock, constructed from an augmented social graph. In Unblock, multi-hop paths through social links protect individual participants from exposure to adversaries. Unblock achieves good performance by introducing additional links in the network graph in a manner that minimizes vulnerability. We also develop several transport level techniques for improved latency. We demonstrate the practicality of the system for web traffic workloads.
Unblock extends the OneSwarm system.