Online FOCI workshop 2025-02-20

[jknockel]

The first of two Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshops in 2025 will happen on February 20th 17:00 - 21:30 UTC. This event is fully online and free. The event will take place on gather.town, and registration is required to receive a link for attending the event.

Event web site: https://foci.community/
Registration: https://foci.community/register

The program includes a keynote and 5 research presentations. The full schedule is available on the event website:

• Keynote: When the World Pushes Back: Enumerating Risks of Digital Accountability Research
  Ronald Deibert

• Extended Abstract: Using TURN Servers for Censorship Evasion
  Afonso Vilalonga, Kevin Gallagher, João Resende, Osman Yagan, and Henrique Domingos

• Is Custom Congestion Control a Bad Idea for Circumvention Tools?
  Wayne Wang, Diwen Xue, Piyush Kumar, Ayush Mishra, Anonymous, and Roya Ensafi

• I(ra)nconsistencies: Novel Insights into Iran's Censorship
  Felix Lange, Niklas Niere, Jonathan von Niessen, Dennis Suermann, Nico Heitmann, and Juraj Somorovsky

• The Mechanics of Surveillance in Leading Pakistani Mobile Apps
  Sana Habib, Mohammad Taha Khan, and Jedidiah R. Crandall

• Revisiting BAT Browsers: Protecting At-Risk Populations from Surveillance, Censorship, and Targeted Attacks
  Esther Rodriguez, Lobsang Gyatso, Tenzin Thayai, and Jedidiah R. Crandall

[klzgrad]

Is Custom Congestion Control a Bad Idea for Circumvention Tools?

Is this related to TCP brutal?

[cohosh]

The papers are now up if you want to check them out before the event on Thursday :) https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2025/

[Phoenix-999]

For those interested, here is the Farsi translation of this paper, with a focus on the section titled 'Inconsistencies – Novel Insights into Iran’s Censorship.' You can download it from the link below.

برای خوانندگان ایرانی و فارسی زبان 🇮🇷
نسخه ترجمه شده به زبان فارسی برگرفته از مقاله‌ای که توسط انجمن FOCI منتشر شده است و بخش ترجمه شده از این مقاله که تمرکز بر روی سانسور در ایران و نگاهی نوین به ناسازگاری‌ها در روش‌های فیلترینگ را بررسی و تحلیل می‌کند.

همچنین یک کنفرانس در این زمینه و زمینه‌های دیگر که در مقاله اصلی به آنها اشاره شده است در تاریخ ۲۰ فوریه ۲۰۲۵ به صورت آنلاین و کاملاً رایگان برای عموم تهیه دیده شده که در صورت علاقه‌مندی می‌توانید به صورت زنده به این کنفرانس ملحق شوید.

I(ra)nconsistencies - Novel Insights into Iran’s Censorship.pdf

[wkrp]

Is Custom Congestion Control a Bad Idea for Circumvention Tools?

Is this related to TCP brutal?

Yes, here are the links:
https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2025/foci-2025-0001.php
https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2025/foci-2025-0001.pdf

Using Hysteria and TCP-Brutal as case studies, we demonstrate how these custom CCAs produce traffic patterns that significantly deviate from standard TCP and QUIC behaviors, and further develop simple, threshold-based classifiers to show how a censor can distinguish such proxy traffic by its lack of response to congestion signals.

There is some interesting discussion about loss-based (e.g. TCP cubic) and rate-based (e.g. TCP BBR) congestion control algorithms with respect to Hysteria and TCP-Brutal.