CensorLess: Cost-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions
Dayeon Kang, Jade Sheffey, Mingshi Wu, Pubali Datta, and Amir Houmansadr

TL;DR
CensorLess introduces a serverless-based censorship circumvention proxy that significantly reduces costs by 97% while maintaining robust censorship resistance through dynamic bridge rotation.
Contribution
It presents a novel serverless platform-based approach for censorship circumvention that outperforms existing methods in cost efficiency and robustness.
Findings
Reduces circumvention costs by 97% compared to prior techniques.
Maintains continuous connectivity through live migration.
Employs bridge rotation for enhanced censorship resistance.
Abstract
With the increase in Internet censorship globally, various circumvention tools have been designed and developed. However, the monetary cost of these tools deeply impacts both user choice and the sustainability of provider operations. Recent developments in censorship circumvention research attempted to achieve cost efficiency by utilizing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) spot instances as bridges, but still incurred substantial expenses related to network connectivity and instance maintenance. In this work, we present CensorLess, a circumvention proxy built leveraging the unique benefits of a serverless platform. CensorLess comprises three components: a local proxy that handles client-side communication and ensures compliance with serverless functions' security restrictions, a function refresher that periodically regenerates bridges, and a live migration mechanism that maintains…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Software-Defined Networks and 5G · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
