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Charting Censorship Resilience and Global Internet Reachability: A Quantitative Approach

Marina Ivanović, François Wirz, Jordi Subirà Nieto, Adrian Perrig

TL;DR

This work introduces a quantitative, architecture-agnostic metric framework to evaluate Internet censorship resilience and global reachability across BGP/IP, waypoint-based circumvention, and SCION path-aware architectures. Central to the framework is the Avoidability Potential $AP_{\mathcal{X}}(\mathcal{S}, \mathcal{D})$, from which the Censorship Resilience Potential $CRP_{\mathcal{C}}(\mathcal{S}, \mathcal{D})$ and Global Reachability Potential $GRP_{\mathcal{X}}(\mathcal{S}, \mathcal{S})$ are derived using defined path-avoidance indicators. The authors instantiate and evaluate the metrics on real AS topologies and country networks, comparing BGP, waypoint, and SCION, and find that border ASes can significantly constrain outflow paths, while path-awareness in SCION and multiple waypoint options can enhance resilience and reduce routing centralization. The findings suggest that adopting path-aware architectures could improve censorship resilience and diversify global routing, offering policymakers a quantitative basis for evaluating network design choices.

Abstract

Internet censorship and global Internet reachability are prevalent topics of today's Internet. Nonetheless, the impact of network topology and Internet architecture to these aspects of the Internet is under-explored. With the goal of informing policy discussions with an objective basis, we present an approach for evaluating both censorship resilience and global Internet reachability using quantitative network metrics, which are applicable to current BGP/IP networks and also to alternative Internet network architectures. We devise and instantiate the metric on the network topology of multiple countries, comparing the BGP/IP network, an overlay network using a waypoint mechanism for circumventing undesired nodes, and the path-aware Internet architecture SCION. The novelty of the approach resides in providing a metric enabling the analysis of these aspects of the Internet at the routing level, taking into account the innate properties of the routing protocol and architecture. We demonstrate that the Internet topology matters, and strongly influences both censorship resilience and reachability to the global Internet. Finally, we argue that access to multiple paths accompanied with path-awareness could enable a higher level of censorship resilience compared to the current Internet, and reduce the centralization of Internet routing.

Charting Censorship Resilience and Global Internet Reachability: A Quantitative Approach

TL;DR

This work introduces a quantitative, architecture-agnostic metric framework to evaluate Internet censorship resilience and global reachability across BGP/IP, waypoint-based circumvention, and SCION path-aware architectures. Central to the framework is the Avoidability Potential , from which the Censorship Resilience Potential and Global Reachability Potential are derived using defined path-avoidance indicators. The authors instantiate and evaluate the metrics on real AS topologies and country networks, comparing BGP, waypoint, and SCION, and find that border ASes can significantly constrain outflow paths, while path-awareness in SCION and multiple waypoint options can enhance resilience and reduce routing centralization. The findings suggest that adopting path-aware architectures could improve censorship resilience and diversify global routing, offering policymakers a quantitative basis for evaluating network design choices.

Abstract

Internet censorship and global Internet reachability are prevalent topics of today's Internet. Nonetheless, the impact of network topology and Internet architecture to these aspects of the Internet is under-explored. With the goal of informing policy discussions with an objective basis, we present an approach for evaluating both censorship resilience and global Internet reachability using quantitative network metrics, which are applicable to current BGP/IP networks and also to alternative Internet network architectures. We devise and instantiate the metric on the network topology of multiple countries, comparing the BGP/IP network, an overlay network using a waypoint mechanism for circumventing undesired nodes, and the path-aware Internet architecture SCION. The novelty of the approach resides in providing a metric enabling the analysis of these aspects of the Internet at the routing level, taking into account the innate properties of the routing protocol and architecture. We demonstrate that the Internet topology matters, and strongly influences both censorship resilience and reachability to the global Internet. Finally, we argue that access to multiple paths accompanied with path-awareness could enable a higher level of censorship resilience compared to the current Internet, and reduce the centralization of Internet routing.
Paper Structure (17 sections, 8 equations, 3 figures, 2 tables)

This paper contains 17 sections, 8 equations, 3 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. Quantifying Avoidability in a Network
  4. Avoidability Potential
  5. Censorship Resilience Potential
  6. Global Reachability Potential
  7. Experimental Evaluation
  8. Datasets
  9. Country Network
  10. SCION Topology
  11. Simulation on Diverse Network Models
  12. Experimental Results
  13. National Censorship Resilience Potential
  14. Global Internet Reachability
  15. Related Work
  16. ...and 2 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Censorship Resilience Potential ($CRP$): the algorithm pipeline, with censoring ASes known a priori.
  • Figure 2: Censorship Resilience Potential ($CRP$): the algorithm pipeline, where the Cumulative Choke Potential ($CCP$) is used for defining the set of censoring ASes $\mathcal{C}$a posteriori.
  • Figure 3: Censorship Resilience Potential for BGP, waypoint model, and SCION, presented for various countries and varying number of censoring ASes, $N$.