Since 2006, Turkmenistan has been listed as one of the few Internet enemies by Reporters without Borders due to its extensively censored Internet and strictly regulated information control policies. Existing reports of filtering in Turkmenistan rely on a small number of vantage points or test a small number of websites. Yet, the country's poor Internet adoption rates and small population can make more comprehensive measurement challenging. With a population of only six million people and an Internet penetration rate of only 38%, it is challenging to either recruit in-country volunteers or obtain vantage points to conduct remote network measurements at scale. We present the largest measurement study to date of Turkmenistan's Web censorship. To do so, we developed TMC, which tests the blocking status of millions of domains across the three foundational protocols of the Web (DNS, HTTP, and HTTPS). Importantly, TMC does not require access to vantage points in the country. We apply TMC to 15.5M domains, our results reveal that Turkmenistan censors more than 122K domains, using different blocklists for each protocol. We also reverse-engineer these censored domains, identifying 6K over-blocking rules causing incidental filtering of more than 5.4M domains. Finally, we use Geneva, an open-source censorship evasion tool, to discover five new censorship evasion strategies that can defeat Turkmenistan's censorship at both transport and application layers. We will publicly release both the data collected by TMC and the code for censorship evasion.
翻译:自2006年起,土库曼斯坦因其广泛审查的互联网及严格管制的信息控制政策,被无国界记者组织列为少数"互联网公敌"国家。现有关于土库曼斯坦过滤行为的报告仅依赖少量监测点或测试少数网站,但该国极低的互联网普及率与较小的人口规模使得开展全面测量更具挑战性。在仅有600万人口、38%互联网渗透率的条件下,招募境内志愿者或获取远程网络测量观测点均存在困难。我们提出了迄今规模最大的土库曼斯坦网络审查测量研究,为此开发了TMC系统——该工具可跨网络三大基础协议(DNS、HTTP、HTTPS)检测数百万域名的封锁状态。值得注意的是,TMC无需部署境内观测点即可运行。通过对1550万个域名进行测试,结果显示土库曼斯坦使用不同协议对应的独立封锁列表屏蔽超过12.2万个域名。我们进一步反向解析这些被屏蔽域名,发现6000条过度封锁规则导致意外过滤540多万个域名。最终,我们利用开源审查规避工具Geneva,发现了五种可同时在传输层与应用层突破土库曼斯坦审查的新型规避策略。我们将公开发布TMC采集数据及审查规避相关代码。