Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia

Abstract

Until now, censorship research has largely focused on highly centralized networks that rely on government-run technical choke-points, such as the Great Firewall of China. Although it was previously thought to be prohibitively difficult, large-scale censorship in decentralized networks are on the rise. Our in-depth investigation of the mechanisms underlying decentralized information control in Russia shows that such large-scale censorship can be achieved in decentralized networks through inexpensive commodity equipment. This new form of information control presents a host of problems for censorship measurement, including difficulty identifying censored content, requiring measurements from diverse perspectives, and variegated censorship mechanisms that require significant effort to identify in a robust manner. By working with activists on the ground in Russia, we obtained five leaked blocklists signed by Roskomnadzor, the Russian government's federal service for mass communications, along with seven years of historical blocklist data. This authoritative list contains domains, IPs, and subnets that ISPs have been required to block since November 1st, 2012. We used the blocklist from April 24 2019, that contains 132,798 domains, 324,695 IPs, and 39 subnets, to collect active measurement data from residential, data center and infrastructural vantage points. Our vantage points span 408 unique ASes that control ≈ 65% of Russian IP address space. Our findings suggest that data centers block differently from the residential ISPs both in quantity and in method of blocking, resulting in different experiences of the Internet for residential network perspectives and data center perspectives. As expected, residential vantage points experience high levels of censorship. While we observe a range of blocking techniques, such as TCP/IP blocking, DNS manipulation, or keyword based filtering, we find that residential ISPs are more likely to inject blockpages with explicit notices to users when censorship is enforced. Russia's censorship architecture is a blueprint, and perhaps a forewarning of what and how national censorship policies could be implemented in many other countries that have similarly diverse ISP ecosystems to Russia's. Understanding decentralized control will be key to continuing to preserve Internet freedom for years to come.

Law and Digitization in Russia

“…The Russian government has tightened its control and supervision of cyberspace significantly in the last decade. The academic literature often sees this process in the context of containing opposition and political protest (Maréchal 2017;Ramesh et al 2020). However, at the same time cyberspace faces challenges on its own and provides new opportunities for criminal or civil misbehavior, including the following: spreading of computer worms, viruses, bots, as well as other malware and spyware; illicitly accessing computers; exceeding authorized access; trafficking in information; enabling or facilitating unauthorized activities in cyberspace; and using information, communications systems, and networks to embezzle, commit fraud, stalk and harass, or invade the privacy of others (Ryan et al 2011).…”

“…Other scholars identify Russian policies as "decentralized control" due to the lack of direct ownership of Internet Service Providers (ISP) by government authorities. This lowers their ability to unilaterally roll out technical censorship measures, instead pushing the state to enact controls via law and policy, compelling their network owners to comply, which subsequently significantly increases censorship (Ramesh et al 2020).…”

Understanding Internet Censorship in Europe: The Case of Spain

“…To this end, we define online censorship as any form of network interference that disrupts the normal operation of services or content in the World Wide Web to prohibit access to a specific audience. Previous research examined the presence of censorship in various countries such as China [19,31], Thailand [23], Bangladesh [33], Pakistan [1,34], India [24,57], Iran [5,9], Syria [4,15], Turkey [50,51], Russia [44], and Mexico [28]. There is almost no previous research about the topic of censorship in Spain, except for some clues [3,6,11,29,40].…”

Understanding the Practices of Global Censorship through Accurate, End-to-End Measurements

“…Significant research efforts [8,13,18,32,34,36,39,44,45,49,51,56] have been devoted to measuring Internet censorship. Specifically, to detect censorship activities in a region, the basic idea is to send a request from a vantage point within the region and then compare the response with a valid response from a legitimate server.…”

“…However, the dilemma here is that if the request is blocked, the vantage point has no ground truth to identify the valid response. To tackle this issue, existing studies [18,32,36,39,45] collect the valid responses from nodes deployed in multiple countries. However, this approach inevitably reduces the detection reliability due to the diversity and flexibility of Internet services.…”