The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) creates software for resisting repressive internet censorship through censorship measurement research and analysis, and openly publishes censorship measurements that are crowdsourced by users—many of whom are based in authoritarian information contexts.
OONI works thanks to a global network of volunteers who run tests to detect and document repressive internet censorship worldwide, increasing transparency around digital rights violations. As the OONI Probe network grows, so does the risk that some users (intentionally or unintentionally) taint measurements by supplying faulty data to the submission server. This may be the result of a deliberate attack aimed at discrediting OONI’s platform by submitting false measurements or due to faulty OONI Probe installations. Given increased threats from the CCP and other digital authoritarians, the OONI team needs a way to identify and remove faulty measurements while protecting user privacy. This project will create a probe-anonymous credential system that can provide verification at-scale and quickly, and without de-anonymizing measurement contributors.
This effort will not only improve the security and reliability of OONI measurements, but offer a new, secure probe anonymous credentialing system that other crowd-sourcing open source projects can implement to improve their systems.
