Researchers at the University of Maryland have created software that they hope will allow users to prevent foreign governments from monitoring their web usage.
The system, called Alibi Routing, enables users to retrieve information without allowing it to pass through certain countries. Users can search “a peer-to-peer network to locate ‘peers’ — other users running the Alibi Routing software — that can relay a user’s packets to its ultimate destination while avoiding specified forbidden regions,” the researchers said.
A packet is a unit of data that travels from the user to the destination that the user is seeking. Users can specify the countries they want to avoid.
Currently, if a user in one country is too close to a neighboring country, the websites and information that they retrieve online may pass through the neighboring country’s systems, enabling foreign governments to censor what they are able to access. The Maryland developers point out in a news release that research has shown “queries that merely pass through China’s borders are subject to the same risk as if the requests came from one of the country’s own residents.”
Similarly, Canadians may be able to use the technology to protect themselves from snooping by federal agencies in the United States. A 2012 study led by the University of Toronto found that up to 75 percent of Canadian Internet traffic was being routed through the U.S. In so doing, organizations like the National Security Agency were permitted to look through it, pursuant to laws like the Patriot Act in a manner that would be illegal in Canada.
“With recent events, such as censorship of Internet traffic, suspicious ‘boomerang routing’ where data leaves a region only to come back again, and monitoring of users’ data, we became increasingly interested in this notion of empowering users to have more control over what happens with their data,” said project lead Dave Levin, an assistant research scientist in Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.
The program won’t allow users inside of a country to evade impositions by their own government, but it will allow users to interact with others around the globe with less risk of a third-party government getting in the way.
“If there are two users both in the same U.S. city communicating with one another, it’s unlikely that the traffic would go through China,” Levin told the Washington Examiner, “but if a user is communicating with someone in India or South Korea, it may be more feasible,”
Levin also said that to date, some telecommunications providers have been able to interfere with Internet traffic globally if they were ambitious enough. “Using the Internet routing protocols, they can basically announce to others on the Internet, ‘If you need to get to site X, I have a really really fast way to get there, so send it through me,’ and subsequently drop all of the traffic.
“This is called BGP hijacking, or creating a black hole,” Levin said.
One example of BGP hijacking took place in 2008, when Pakistan ordered its state-owned telecommunications company to divert traffic within the country away from YouTube because of videos that it deemed offensive to Islam. The effect was so substantial that more than 60 percent of Internet users on the globe were diverted when they tried to access the site. The outage lasted for two hours.
In the years to follow, YouTube attempted to placate Pakistan by removing some of the offending content, but the site remains blocked in the country. Censorship by a variety governments takes place against several major websites, Levin said, including Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google.
Levin said the software took about three years for the team to develop, and hopes it will be available for users to test by the end of the year.
