Bridging Barriers: A Survey of Challenges and Priorities in the Censorship Circumvention Landscape

Circumvention tools circulate through word-of-mouth and underground distribution networks rather than official app stores, making the ecosystem opaque and creating a supply-chain attack surface: adversarially-operated tools (including, per prior work, apps linked to the People's Liberation Army) reach users through the same channels as legitimate tools. The survey documents that providers are aware of misbehaving players but lack coordinated mechanisms to flag or exclude them.

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The first multi-perspective study of the circumvention-tool ecosystem surveyed 12 leading CT providers collectively serving over 100 million users, plus CT users in Russia and China. Beyond technical blocking challenges, the study found that funding constraints, usability problems, misconceptions (users and providers hold inaccurate beliefs about each other's capabilities), and misbehaving players (tools operated by adversarial actors) are equally significant threats to the ecosystem's health — and are largely unaddressed by the academic research community.

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