Too Close for Comfort: Morasses of (Anti-) Censorship in the Era of CDNs

Recent research claims that “powerful” nation-states may be hegemonic over significant web traffic of “underserved” nations (e.g., Brazil and India). Such traffic may be surveilled when transiting (or ending in) these powerful nations. On the other hand, content distribution networks (CDNs) are designed to bring web content closer to end-users. Thus it is natural to ask whether CDNs have led to the localization of Internet traffic within the country’s boundary, challenging the notion of nation-state hegemony. Further, such traffic localization may inadvertently enhance a country’s ability to coerce content providers to censor (or monitor) access within its boundary. On top of that, the obvious solution, i.e., anti-censorship approaches, may sadly face a new dilemma. Traditional ones, relying on proxies, are easily discoverable. Whereas newer ones (e.g., Decoy Routing, Cache-Browser, Domain Fronting and CovertCast etc.) might not work as they require accessing web content hosted outside the censors’ boundary. We thus quantitatively analyzed the impact of web content localization on various anti-censorship systems. Such analysis requires geolocating the websites. Thus we adapted a multilateration method, Constraint Based Geolocation (CBG), with additional heuristics. We call it as Region Specific CBG (R-CBG). In more than 89% cases, R-CBG correctly classifies hosts as inside (or outside) w.r.t. a nation. Our empirical study, involving five countries, shows that the majority (61%−92%) of popular country-specific websites are hosted within a client’s own country. Further, additional heuristics classify the majority of them to be on CDNs.

Primal-dual based distributed approximation algorithm for Prize-collecting Steiner tree

The Prize-collecting Steiner tree (PCST) problem is a generalization of the Steiner tree problem that finds applications in network design, content distribution networks, and many more. There are a few centralized approximation algorithms [D. Bienstock, M. X. Goemans, D. Simchi-Levi and D. Williamson, A note on the prize collecting traveling salesman problem. Math. Program. 59 (1993) 413–420; M. X. Goemans and D. E. Williamson, A general approximation technique for constrained forest problems, SIAM J. Appl. Math. 24(2) (1995) 296–317; D. S. Johnson, M. Minkoff and S. Phillips, The prize collecting Steiner tree problem: Theory and practice, in Proc. Eleventh Annual ACM-SIAM Symp. Discrete Algorithms, SODA ’00 (2000), pp. 760–769; A. Archer, M. Hossein Bateni and M. Taghi Hajiaghayi, Improved approximation algorithms for prize-collecting Steiner tree and TSP, SIAM J. Comput. 40(2) (2011) 309–332] for solving the PCST problem. However, the problem has seen very little progress in the distributed setting; to the best of our knowledge, the only distributed algorithms proposed so far are due to Rossetti [N. G. Rossetti, A first attempt on the distributed prize-collecting Steiner tree problem, M.Sc. thesis, University of Iceland, Reykjavik (2015)]: one of them fails to guarantee a constant approximation factor while the other one is essentially centralized. In this work, first, we present a deterministic [Formula: see text] factor distributed approximation algorithm (D-PCST algorithm) that constructs a PCST for a given connected undirected graph of [Formula: see text] nodes with non-negative edge weights and non-negative prize value for each node. The D-PCST algorithm is based on the primal-dual method and uses a technique of preserving dual constraints in a distributed manner, without relying on knowledge of the global structure of the network. For an input graph [Formula: see text], the round and message complexities of the D-PCST algorithm in the CONGEST model are [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] respectively, where [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. Furthermore, we modify the D-PCST algorithm and show that a [Formula: see text]-approximate PCST can be deterministically computed using [Formula: see text] rounds and [Formula: see text] messages in the CONGEST model, where [Formula: see text] is the unweighted diameter of [Formula: see text]. For networks with [Formula: see text], the modified D-PCST algorithm performs better than the original one in terms of the round complexity. Both the algorithms require [Formula: see text] bits of memory in each node, where [Formula: see text] is the maximum degree of a node in the graph.

Evaluating CRoS-NDN: a comparative performance analysis of a controller-based routing scheme for named-data networking

The huge amount of content names available in Named-Data Networking (NDN) challenges both the required routing table size and the techniques for locating and forwarding information. Content copies and content mobility exacerbate the scalability challenge to reach content in the new locations. We present and analyze the performance of a proposed Controller-based Routing Scheme, named CRoS-NDN, which preserves NDN features using the same interest and data packets. CRoS-NDN supports content mobility and provides fast content recovery from copies that do not belong to the consumer-producer path because it splits identity from location without incurring FIB size explosion or supposing prefix aggregation. It provides features similar to Content Distribution Networks (CDN) in NDN, and improves the routing efficiency. We compare our proposal with similar routing protocols and derive analytical expressions for lower-bound efficiency and upper-bound latency. We also conduct extensive simulations to evaluate results in data delivery efficiency and delay. The results show the robust behavior of the proposed scheme achieving the best efficiency and delay performance for a wide range of scenarios. Furthermore, CRoS-NDN results in low use of processing time and memory for a growing number of prefixes.