Censorship Resistance: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom?
This addresses the challenge of optimizing censorship resistance for users and developers in repressive regimes, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game-theoretic models without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of designing censorship resistance systems by analyzing whether to select a single best system or multiple good ones, modeling it as a cat-and-mouse game and showing that the optimal strategy depends on the censor's utility function, such as tolerance to false positives and false negatives.
This paper argues that one of the most important decisions in designing and deploying censorship resistance systems is whether one set of system options should be selected (the best), or whether there should be several sets of good ones. We model the problem of choosing these options as a cat-and-mouse game and show that the best strategy depends on the value the censor associates with total system censorship versus partial, and the tolerance of false positives. If the censor has a low tolerance to false positives then choosing one censorship resistance system is best. Otherwise choosing several systems is the better choice, but the way traffic should be distributed over the systems depends on the tolerance of the censor to false negatives. We demonstrate that establishing the censor's utility function is critical to discovering the best strategy for censorship resistance.