Fellow
Information Controls Fellow
Ain Ghazal is an Information Controls Fellow working with the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) to study Censorship Resistance Systems in global VPN infrastructure.
Ain’s OTF Fellowship at OONI hopes to quantify interference on VPN connections, thereby improving existing measurements and increasing the reliability of Censorship Resistance Systems in global VPN infrastructure.
Global usage for VPN technologies shows a sustained demand in the last few years, but state-level restrictions and interference with VPN traffic shows a growing trend too. By improving on OONI's measurements for Tor’s pluggable transports and VPN service disruption, Ain will build upon a subset of OONI data to map the state of VPN interference. This project will study concrete censor behavior in selected countries, in order to classify and enumerate possible circumvention strategies for a given context. Ain's research will also explore how to reduce the cost, for Censorship Resistance Systems, to incorporate useful knowledge about the censor’s capabilities in a way that can contribute to slowing down the advances of the censors over their sphere of influence.