{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,5]],"date-time":"2026-08-05T11:23:23Z","timestamp":1785929003723,"version":"3.56.0"},"reference-count":54,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"3","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,14]],"date-time":"2021-12-14T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1639440000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/www.acm.org\/publications\/policies\/copyright_policy#Background"}],"funder":[{"name":"National Science Foundation","award":["DGE-1821744"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["DGE-1821744"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000183","name":"Army Research Office","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["W911NF19-1-0049"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["W911NF19-1-0049"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000183","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst."],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,14]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>It is challenging to conduct a large scale Internet censorship measurement, as it involves triggering censors through artificial requests and identifying abnormalities from corresponding responses. Due to the lack of ground truth on the expected responses from legitimate services, previous studies typically require a heavy, unscalable manual inspection to identify false positives while still leaving false negatives undetected. In this paper, we propose Disguiser, a novel framework that enables end-to-end measurement to accurately detect the censorship activities and reveal the censor deployment without manual efforts. The core of Disguiser is a control server that replies with a static payload to provide the ground truth of server responses. As such, we send requests from various types of vantage points across the world to our control server, and the censorship activities can be recognized if a vantage point receives a different response. In particular, we design and conduct a cache test to pre-exclude the vantage points that could be interfered by cache proxies along the network path. Then we perform application traceroute towards our control server to explore censors' behaviors and their deployment. With Disguiser, we conduct 58 million measurements from vantage points in 177 countries. We observe 292 thousand censorship activities that block DNS, HTTP, or HTTPS requests inside 122 countries, achieving a 10^-6 false positive rate and zero false negative rate. Furthermore, Disguiser reveals the censor deployment in 13 countries.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3491055","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,15]],"date-time":"2021-12-15T18:32:19Z","timestamp":1639593139000},"page":"1-25","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["Understanding the Practices of Global Censorship through Accurate, End-to-End Measurements"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"5","author":[{"given":"Lin","family":"Jin","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Shuai","family":"Hao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Haining","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Virginia Tech, Arlington, VA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Chase","family":"Cotton","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","unstructured":"1&1 IONOS INC. [n.d.]. Understanding and Configuring DNS TTL . https:\/\/www.ionos.com\/community\/server-cloud-infrastructure\/dns\/understanding-and-configuring-dns-ttl\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_2_1","unstructured":"Alexa. [n.d.]. https:\/\/www.alexa.com\/topsites ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_4_1","volume-title":"USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Anderson Collin","year":"2014","unstructured":"Collin Anderson, Philipp Winter, and Roya. 2014. Global Network Interference Detection over the RIPE Atlas Network. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_5_1","volume-title":"The Collateral Damage of Internet Censorship by DNS Injection . ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review","author":"Anonymous","year":"2012","unstructured":"Anonymous. 2012. The Collateral Damage of Internet Censorship by DNS Injection . ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (2012)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_6_1","volume-title":"Triplet Censors: Demystifying Great Firewalltextquoterights DNS Censorship Behavior. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Anonymous","year":"2020","unstructured":"Anonymous, Arian Akhavan Niaki, Nguyen Phong Hoang, Phillipa Gill, and Amir Houmansadr. 2020. Triplet Censors: Demystifying Great Firewalltextquoterights DNS Censorship Behavior. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_7_1","volume":"201","author":"Aryan Simurgh","unstructured":"Simurgh Aryan, Homa Aryan, and J. Alex Halderman. 2013. Internet Censorship in Iran: A First Look. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) .","journal-title":"J. Alex Halderman."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_8_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3319535.3363189"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_9_1","unstructured":"St\u00e9phane Bortzmeyer. [n.d.]. DNS Censorship (DNS Lies) As Seen By RIPE Atlas . https:\/\/labs.ripe.net\/Members\/stephane_bortzmeyer\/dns-censorship-dns-lies-seen-by-atlas-probes ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_10_1","volume-title":"USENIX Security Symposium .","author":"Burnett Sam","year":"2010","unstructured":"Sam Burnett, Nick Feamster, and Santosh Vempala. 2010. Chipping Away at Censorship Firewalls with User-Generated Content. In USENIX Security Symposium ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_11_1","unstructured":"CAIDA AS Rank. [n.d.]. http:\/\/as-rank.caida.org\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_12_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2663716.2663720"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_13_1","unstructured":"Citizen Lab. 2019. URL Testing Lists Intended for Discovering Website Censorship . https:\/\/github.com\/citizenlab\/test-lists\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_14_1","volume-title":"ConceptDoppler: A Weather Tracker for Internet Censorship. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) .","author":"Crandall Jedidiah R.","year":"2007","unstructured":"Jedidiah R. Crandall, Daniel Zinn, Michael Byrd, Earl Barr, and Rich East. 2007. ConceptDoppler: A Weather Tracker for Internet Censorship. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_15_1","volume-title":"Analyzing the Great Firewall of China Over Space and Time. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) .","author":"Ensaf Roya","unstructured":"Roya Ensaf, Philipp Winter, Abdullah Mueen, and Jedidiah R. Crandall. 2015. Analyzing the Great Firewall of China Over Space and Time. In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_16_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1515\/popets-2015-0009"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_17_1","volume-title":"OONI: Open Observatory of Network Interference. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Filast\u00f2 Arturo","year":"2012","unstructured":"Arturo Filast\u00f2 and Jacob Appelbaum. 2012. OONI: Open Observatory of Network Interference. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_18_1","unstructured":"FortiGuard Labs. [n.d.]. https:\/\/fortiguard.com\/webfilter ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_19_1","volume-title":"Measuring Chinatextquoterights DNS Censorship. In USENIX Security Symposium .","author":"Hoang Nguyen Phong","year":"2021","unstructured":"Nguyen Phong Hoang, Arian Akhavan Niaki, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Pellaeon Lin, Bill Marczak, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Phillipa Gill, and Michalis Polychronakis. 2021. How Great is the Great Firewall? Measuring Chinatextquoterights DNS Censorship. In USENIX Security Symposium ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_20_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2810103.2813696"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_21_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2046707.2046730"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_23_1","unstructured":"IP-API. [n.d.]. http:\/\/ip-api.com\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_24_1","unstructured":"IPinfo.io. [n.d.]. http:\/\/ipinfo.io\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_25_1","volume-title":"Your Remnant Tells Secret: Residual Resolution in DDoS Protection Services. In IEEE\/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) .","author":"Jin Lin","year":"2018","unstructured":"Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang, and Chase Cotton. 2018. Your Remnant Tells Secret: Residual Resolution in DDoS Protection Services. In IEEE\/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_26_1","volume-title":"Unveil the Hidden Presence: Characterizing the Backend Interface of Content Delivery Networks. In IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) .","author":"Jin Lin","year":"2019","unstructured":"Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang, and Chase Cotton. 2019. Unveil the Hidden Presence: Characterizing the Backend Interface of Content Delivery Networks. In IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_27_1","volume-title":"Understanding the Impact of Encrypted DNS on Internet Censorship. In The Web Conference (WWW) .","author":"Jin Lin","year":"2021","unstructured":"Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang, and Chase Cotton. 2021. Understanding the Impact of Encrypted DNS on Internet Censorship. In The Web Conference (WWW) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_28_1","volume-title":"Ethical Concerns for Censorship Measurement. In ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Ethics in Networked Systems Research (NS Ethics) .","author":"Jones Ben","year":"2015","unstructured":"Ben Jones, Roya Ensafi, Nick Feamster, Vern Paxson, and Nick Weaver. 2015. Ethical Concerns for Censorship Measurement. In ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Ethics in Networked Systems Research (NS Ethics) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_29_1","volume-title":"Decoy Routing: Toward Unblockable Internet Communication. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Karlin Josh","unstructured":"Josh Karlin, Daniel Ellard, Alden W. Jackson, Christine E. Jones, Greg Lauer, David P. Mankins, and W. Timothy Strayer. 2011. Decoy Routing: Toward Unblockable Internet Communication. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_30_1","volume-title":"USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Khattak Sheharbano","year":"2013","unstructured":"Sheharbano Khattak, Mobin Javed, Philip D. Anderson, and Vern Paxson. 2013. Towards Illuminating a Censorship Monitortextquoterights Model to Facilitate Evasion. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_31_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/2663716.2663750"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_32_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/SP.2019.00011"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_33_1","volume-title":"The Anatomy of Web Censorship in Pakistan. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) .","author":"Nabi Zubair","year":"2013","unstructured":"Zubair Nabi. 2013. The Anatomy of Web Censorship in Pakistan. In USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_34_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14722\/ndss.2020.24340"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_35_1","volume-title":"Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) .","author":"Niaki Arian Akhavan","year":"2020","unstructured":"Arian Akhavan Niaki, Shinyoung Cho, Zachary Weinberg, Nguyen Phong Hoang, Abbas Razaghpanah, Nicolas Christin, and Phillipa Gill. 2020. ICLab: A Global, Longitudinal Internet Censorship Measurement Platform. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_36_1","volume-title":"Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, and Zartash Afzal Uzmi","author":"Nisar Aqib","year":"2018","unstructured":"Aqib Nisar, Aqsa Kashaf, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, and Zartash Afzal Uzmi. 2018. Incentivizing Censorship Measurements via Circumvention. In ACM SIGCOMM ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_37_1","volume-title":"Augur: Internet-Wide Detection of Connectivity Disruptions. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P).","author":"Pearce Paul","year":"2017","unstructured":"Paul Pearce, Roya Ensafi, Frank Li, Nick Feamster, and Vern Paxson. 2017a. Augur: Internet-Wide Detection of Connectivity Disruptions. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_38_1","volume-title":"Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation. In USENIX Security Symposium .","author":"Pearce Paul","year":"2017","unstructured":"Paul Pearce, Ben Jones, Frank Li, Roya Ensafi, Nick Feamster, Nick Weaver, and Vern Paxson. 2017b. Global Measurement of DNS Manipulation. In USENIX Security Symposium ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_39_1","unstructured":"ProxyRack. [n.d.] a. https:\/\/www.proxyrack.com\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_40_1","unstructured":"ProxyRack. [n.d.] b. https:\/\/www.proxyrack.com\/become-a-peer\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_41_1","volume-title":"Investigating Large Scale HTTPS Interception in Kazakhstan. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) .","author":"Raman Ram Sundara","year":"2020","unstructured":"Ram Sundara Raman, Leonid Evdokimov, Eric Wurstrow, J. Alex Halderman, and Roya Ensaf. 2020 a. Investigating Large Scale HTTPS Interception in Kazakhstan. In ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_42_1","volume-title":"Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) .","author":"Raman Ram Sundara","year":"2020","unstructured":"Ram Sundara Raman, Prerana Shenoy, Katharina Kohls, and Roya Ensaf. 2020 b. Censored Planet: An Internet-wide, Longitudinal Censorship Observatory. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_43_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14722\/ndss.2020.23099"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_44_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.14722\/ndss.2020.23098"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_45_1","unstructured":"RIPE Atlas. [n.d.]. https:\/\/atlas.ripe.net\/."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_46_1","unstructured":"Robert Kisteleki. [n.d.]. Ethics of RIPE Atlas Measurements . https:\/\/labs.ripe.net\/Members\/kistel\/ethics-of-ripe-atlas-measurements ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_47_1","volume-title":"Routing Around Decoys. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) .","author":"Schuchard Max","year":"2012","unstructured":"Max Schuchard, John Geddes, Christopher Thompson, and Nicholas Hopper. 2012. Routing Around Decoys. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_48_1","volume-title":"Satellite: Joint Analysis of CDNs and Network-level Interference. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC).","author":"Scott Will","year":"2016","unstructured":"Will Scott, Thomas Anderson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Arvind Krishnamurthy. 2016. Satellite: Joint Analysis of CDNs and Network-level Interference. In USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC)."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_49_1","volume-title":"SoK: Towards Grounding Censorship Circumvention in Empiricism. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) .","author":"Tschantz Michael Carl","year":"2016","unstructured":"Michael Carl Tschantz, Sadia Afroz, Anonymous, and Vern Paxson. 2016. SoK: Towards Grounding Censorship Circumvention in Empiricism. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_50_1","volume-title":"Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship. In USENIX Security Symposium .","author":"VanderSloot Benjamin","year":"2018","unstructured":"Benjamin VanderSloot, Allison McDonald, Will Scott, J. Alex Halderman, and Roya Ensafi. 2018. Quack: Scalable Remote Measurement of Application-Layer Censorship. In USENIX Security Symposium ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_51_1","volume-title":"SymTCP: Eluding Stateful Deep Packet Inspection with Automated Discrepancy Discovery. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) .","author":"Wang Zhongjie","unstructured":"Zhongjie Wang, Shitong Zhu, Yue Cao, Zhiyun Qian, Chengyu Song, Srikanth V. Krishnamurthy, Kevin S. Chan, and Tracy D. Braun. 2020. SymTCP: Eluding Stateful Deep Packet Inspection with Automated Discrepancy Discovery. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) ."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_52_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3278532.3278551"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_53_1","volume":"201","author":"Wustrow Eric","unstructured":"Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman. 2011. Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure. In USENIX Security Symposium .","journal-title":"J. Alex Halderman."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_54_1","volume":"201","author":"Xu Xueyang","unstructured":"Xueyang Xu, Z. Morley Mao, and J. Alex Halderman. 2011. Internet Censorship in China: Where Does the Filtering Occur?. In Passive and Active Network Measurement (PAM) .","journal-title":"J. Alex Halderman."},{"key":"e_1_2_1_55_1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1145\/3278532.3278555"},{"key":"e_1_2_1_56_1","volume-title":"Practical Censorship Evasion Leveraging Content Delivery Networks. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) .","author":"Zolfaghari Hadi","year":"2016","unstructured":"Hadi Zolfaghari and Amir Houmansadr. 2016. Practical Censorship Evasion Leveraging Content Delivery Networks. In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) ."}],"container-title":["Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3491055","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3491055","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"syndication"},{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1145\/3491055","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,6,17]],"date-time":"2025-06-17T21:25:06Z","timestamp":1750195506000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/dl.acm.org\/doi\/10.1145\/3491055"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,14]]},"references-count":54,"journal-issue":{"issue":"3","published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,14]]}},"alternative-id":["10.1145\/3491055"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/3491055","relation":{},"ISSN":["2476-1249"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2476-1249","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,14]]},"assertion":[{"value":"2021-12-15","order":2,"name":"published","label":"Published","group":{"name":"publication_history","label":"Publication History"}}]}}