Free livestream of FOCI, PETS, and HotPETs, 2024-07-15 to 2024-07-19

[wkrp]

Next week, you can to watch some censorship-related talks online, for free: FOCI (Monday), PETS (Tuesday–Thursday), and HotPETs (Friday). The talks go from 09:00 to 17:00 UK time (UTC+1).

It doesn't say yet how the online streaming will work, but watch this page for updates: https://petsymposium.org/2024/registration.php. The £250 online registration fee is only if you are presenting a talk or you want to participate in Q&A; just watching the talks will be free.

Streamed sessions will be available to everyone for free, but you must register to participate (present a paper, participate in Q&As and discussions).

The FOCI program has a lot of new censorship-related research:

• Session I: Censorship and Machine Learning
  • The Impacts of Online Censorship on LLMs
  • Leveraging Large Language Models to Identify Internet Censorship through Network Data
  • Automated DNS tampering detection using Machine Learning
• Session II: Censorship Circumvention Strategies
  • Exploring Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for Censorship Circumvention
  • Looking at the Clouds: Leveraging Cloud Services for Censorship-Resistant Rendezvous Channels
  • Ten Years Gone: Revisiting Cloud Storage Transports to Reduce Censored User Burdens
  • Turning Attacks into Advantages: Evading HTTP Censorship with HTTP Request Smuggling
• Session III: Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • RecoCoDe: Recover From Data Corruption in Deniable Storage
  • A case study on DDoS attacks against Tor relays
  • (P)KT-IEE: Secure Key Transparency Protocols for Interoperable End-to-End Encrypted Message Systems
• Session IV: Analyzing censorship + circumvention techniques
  • Detecting VPN Traffic through Encapsulated TCP Behavior
  • Analyzing Prominent Mobile Apps in Latin America
  • Lost in Translation: Characterizing Automated Censorship in Online Translation Services

The PETS program has a session devoted to censorship on Wednesday, and a keynote by Roya Ensafi on Thursday.

• Automatic generation of web censorship probe lists
• Communication Breakdown: Modularizing Application Tunneling for Signaling Around Censorship
• A Framework for Provably Secure Onion Routing against a Global Adversary
• Onion Services in the Wild: A Study of Deanonymization Attacks
• CoStricTor: Collaborative HTTP Strict Transport Security in Tor Browser
• DeTorrent: An Adversarial Padding-only Traffic Analysis Defense

Keynote: Fighting Back: Science’s Role in Defending Internet Freedom on an Increasingly Censored Planet

Abstract: The last decade has seen an alarming spread of network interference and censorship well beyond traditional offenders such as Russia and China. This alarming trend jeopardises Internet freedom for billions of users around the world. To preserve human rights and Internet freedom, the scientific community must step up to bring transparency to such practices, build more effective defensive technologies, and partner with civil society to safeguard users. In this talk, I will share experiences from my work in this critical area as well as highlight key lessons learned and pressing challenges where your expertise and engagement are urgently needed.

Bio: Roya Ensafi is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where her research focuses on Internet security and privacy, with the goal of creating techniques and systems to better protect users online. She is particularly passionate about online censorship, geo-discrimination, surveillance, and related threats to Internet freedom. Prof. Ensafi is the founder of Censored Planet, a global censorship observatory. She has studied Russia’s throttling of Twitter, HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan, and China’s Great Cannon attack, among many other instances of network interference. She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER, Google Faculty Research Award, multiple IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, and the Consumer Reports Digital Lab fellowship. Her work has been cited in popular publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, Business Insider, Wired, and Ars Technica.

[cohosh]

The papers for FOCI issue 2 are now published and available for free online: https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2024/

I've also added a more permanent link for the program, which is now updated with final versions of the paper titles, authors, and paper links: https://foci.community/foci24.html#2024-summer-program

[jresende]

Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noesJ2GfU9s

[Phoenix-999]

@ircfspace 🔴 📺 Free livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noesJ2GfU9s

[wkrp]

The livestream for today's session on censorship (starting 2.5 hours from now) should appear under this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@PETS2024MainLectureTheatre

https://petsymposium.org/2024/program.php

• Automatic generation of web censorship probe lists
• Communication Breakdown: Modularizing Application Tunneling for Signaling Around Censorship
• A Framework for Provably Secure Onion Routing against a Global Adversary
• Onion Services in the Wild: A Study of Deanonymization Attacks
• CoStricTor: Collaborative HTTP Strict Transport Security in Tor Browser
• DeTorrent: An Adversarial Padding-only Traffic Analysis Defense