A Survey of Internet Censorship and its Measurement: Methodology, Trends, and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper surveys network-level Internet censorship techniques, measurement methodologies, and recent trends, including challenges and human factors, providing a comprehensive overview of the field.

Contribution

It offers a detailed taxonomy of censorship methods, measurement approaches, and discusses recent developments and challenges, including circumvention and human aspects.

Findings

Comprehensive taxonomy of censorship techniques

Overview of measurement methodologies and datasets

Discussion of recent trends and human factors

Abstract

Internet censorship limits the access of nodes residing within a specific network environment to the public Internet, and vice versa. During the last decade, techniques for conducting Internet censorship have been developed further. Consequently, methodology for measuring Internet censorship had been improved as well. In this paper, we firstly provide a survey of network-level Internet censorship techniques. Secondly, we survey censorship measurement methodology. We further cover the censorship of circumvention tools and its measurement, as well as available datasets. In cases where it is beneficial, we bridge the terminology and taxonomy of Internet censorship with related domains, namely traffic obfuscation and information hiding. We further extend the technical perspective with recent trends and challenges, including human aspects of Internet censorship.