| Open communication over the Internet poses a serious threat to countries with repressive regimes, leading them to develop and de- ploy censorship mechanisms within their networks. Unfortunately, ex- isting censorship circumvention systems do not provide high availability guarantees to their users, as censors can easily identify, hence disrupt, the traffic belonging to these systems using today’s advanced censor- ship technologies. In this paper we propose SWEET, a highly available censorship-resistant infrastructure. SWEET works by encapsulating a censored user’s traffic inside email messages that are carried over by typ- ical email service providers, like Gmail and Yahoo Mail. As the operation of SWEET is not bound to any specific email provider we argue that a censor will need to block all email communications in order to disrupt SWEET, which is unlikely as email constitutes an important part of to- day’s Internet. Through experiments with a prototype of our system we find that SWEET’s performance is sufficient for web traffic. In particular, regular websites are downloaded within couple of second |
