Free and Open Communications on the Internet

About

The goal of FOCI is to bring together researchers, implementers, and activists working in the area of internet freedom. We recognize that control over online speech has become inherently interdisciplinary, so that studying these problems often involves adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective. We aim to catalyze new research directions and in-depth discussions concerning free and open communications on the internet by providing a space for work that might not fit at conventional computer science measurement and security conferences. We particularly encourage early-stage research or extensions on previously published research.

FOCI 2024 Summer Program

July 15th from 9:00 am till 05:30 pm BST (8:00 - 16:30 UTC)

9:00 - 9:15 Welcome

9:15 - 10:05 Session I: Censorship and Machine Learning

Session chair: Ryan Wails

Extended Abstract: The Impacts of Online Censorship on LLMs
Mohamed Ahmed, Jeffrey Knockel
[paper]

Extended Abstract: Leveraging Large Language Models to Identify Internet Censorship through Network Data
Tianyu Gao, Ping Ji
[paper]

Toward Automated DNS Tampering Detection Using Machine Learning
Paola Calle, Larissa Savitsky, Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Nguyen Phong Hoang, Shinyoung Cho
[paper]

10:05 - 10:30 Break

10:30 - 11:50 Session II: Censorship Circumvention Strategies

Session chair: Arturo Filastò

Exploring Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for Censorship Circumvention
Michael Pu, Andrew Wang, Anthony Chang, Kieran Quan, Yi Wei Zhou
[paper]

Looking at the Clouds: Leveraging Pub/Sub Cloud Services for Censorship-Resistant Rendezvous Channels
Afonso Vilalonga, João S. Resende, Henrique Domingos
[paper]

Ten Years Gone: Revisiting Cloud Storage Transports to Reduce Censored User Burdens
Paul Vines
[paper]

Turning Attacks into Advantages: Evading HTTP Censorship with HTTP Request Smuggling
Philipp Müller, Niklas Niere, Felix Lange, Juraj Somorovsky
[paper]

12:00 - 2:00 Lunch

2:00 - 3:00 Session III: Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Session chair: Piyush Kumar

RecoCoDe: Recover From Data Corruption in Deniable Storage
Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Andrej Milicevic
[paper]

A case study on DDoS attacks against Tor relays
Tobias Höller, René Mairhofer
[paper]

(P)KT-IEE: Secure Key Transparency Protocols for Interoperable End-to-End Encrypted Message Systems
Neenu Garg, Tariq Elahi
[paper]

3:00 - 3:30 Break

3:30 - 4:30 Session IV Analyzing censorship + circumvention techniques

Session chair: Diwen Xue

Detecting VPN Traffic through Encapsulated TCP Behavior
Michelina Hanlon, Gerry Wan, Anna Ascheman, Zakir Durumeric
[paper]

Analyzing Prominent Mobile Apps in Latin America
Beau Kujath, Jeffrey Knockel, Paul Aguilar, Diego Morabito, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, Jedidiah R. Crandall
[paper]

Lost in Translation: Characterizing Automated Censorship in Online Translation Services
Samuel Ruo, Jeffrey Knockel, Zoë Reichert
[paper]

4:30 - 5:30 Awards + Rump session

FOCI 2024 Winter Program

February 19th from 11:00 am till 05:00 pm EST (16:00 - 22:00 UTC)

11:00
Welcome

11:15 - 12:15
Keynote

Against the "arms race"
David Fifield
[video] [slides]

12:30 - 1:30
Session 1: Exposing Censorship

Internet Sanctions on Russian Media: Implementation and Effects
John Kristoff, Max Resing, Moritz Müller, Arturo Filastò, Chris Kanich, Niels ten Oever
[video] [paper]

Bleeding Wall: A Hematologic Examination on the Great Firewall
Sakamoto, Elson Wedwards
[video] [paper]

1:30 - 2:30
Break

2:30 - 4:00
Session 2: Censorship Circumvention Tools

Just add WATER: WebAssembly-based Circumvention Transports
Erik Chi, Gaukas Wang, J. Alex Halderman, Eric Wustrow, Jack Wampler
[video] [paper]

Extended Abstract: Traffic Splitting for Pluggable Transports
Anna Harbluk Lorimer, Rob Jansen, Nick Feamster
[video] [paper]

Extended Abstract: Oscur0: One-shot Circumvention without registration
Mingye Chen, Jack Wampler, Abdulrahman Alaraj, Gaukas Wang, Eric Wustrow
[video] [paper]

4:00 - 5:00
Wrap Up and Town Hall

Topics

We welcome studies on all aspects of digital speech control. Below are some examples of topics that we consider definitely relevant to FOCI, however we encourage community members to interpret this list broadly and feel free to submit works not specifically listed here.

Surveillance: e.g., analyses of corporate or government surveillance; anonymity systems that aim to protect users from surveillance; societal impacts of surveillance
Censorship: e.g., the measurement or evaluation of Internet censorship; tools or systems that circumvent censorship; ethics or risks towards users in the research of censorship measurement or circumvention
Content moderation systems: e.g., analyses of tools employed by social media
Disinformation and misinformation online: e.g., analyses of digital propaganda; social media trends
Press freedom: e.g., deployment of tools to protect whistleblowers; analysis of government or corporate repression of the press
Intellectual Property: e.g., right to repair; analyses of copyright/patent law

Advisory Board

Amir Houmansadr, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Cecylia Bocovich
Dave Levin, University of Maryland
Eric Wustrow, University of Colorado Boulder
Jed Crandall, Arizona State University
Jon Penney, The Citizen Lab, University of Toronto/Dalhousie
Joss Wright, University of Oxford
Nick Feamster, University of Chicago
Phillipa Gill, Google
Prateek Mittal, Princeton University
Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Roger Dingledine, Tor Project
Roya Ensafi, University of Michigan
Tariq Elahi, University of Edinburgh

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