The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures

TL;DR

Future Internet Architectures (FIAs) promise performance and security gains but introduce new privacy and censorship risks. The paper surveys six FIAs—NDN, MobilityFirst, NEBULA, XIA, SCION, and NewIP—examines how their naming, addressing, and routing affect surveillance; it reviews existing censorship techniques, analyzes potential FIA-specific attack vectors, and discusses privacy-enhancing technologies. It concludes that while FIAs offer mechanisms that can improve security, they also expose new vectors for state-level surveillance and censorship, underscoring the need for targeted privacy defenses and robust evaluation guidelines. The work provides a set of research directions and practical recommendations to assess and advance FIA-based privacy tools.

Abstract

Recent initiatives known as Future Internet Architectures (FIAs) seek to redesign the Internet to improve performance, scalability, and security. However, some governments perceive Internet access as a threat to their political standing and engage in widespread network surveillance and censorship. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of the design principles of prominent FIAs in terms of their packet structure, addressing and naming schemes, and routing protocols to foster discussion on how these new systems interact with censorship and surveillance apparatuses. Further, we assess the extent to which existing surveillance and censorship mechanisms can successfully target FIA users while discussing privacy enhancing technologies to counter these mechanisms. We conclude by providing guidelines for future research into novel FIA-based privacy-enhancing technologies, and recommendations to guide the evaluation of these technologies.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Example scenario: A user from router A attempts to access a video file from another host from router D.
• Figure 2: Example NDN interest and matching data packet.
• Figure 3: Example MobilityFirst packet header.
• Figure 4: Example NEBULA packet header with ICING.
• Figure 5: Example XIA packet header.