SoK: The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures

Recent initiatives known as Future Internet Architectures (FIAs) seek to redesign the Internet to improve performance, scalability, and security. However, some governments perceive Internet access as a threat to their political standing and engage in widespread network surveillance and censorship. In this paper, the authors provide an in-depth analysis of the design principles of prominent FIAs in terms of their packet structure, addressing and naming schemes, and routing protocols to foster discussion on how these new systems interact with censorship and surveillance apparatuses. They assess the extent to which existing surveillance and censorship mechanisms can successfully target FIA users while discussing privacy enhancing technologies to counter these mechanisms, and conclude with guidelines for future research into FIA-based privacy-enhancing technologies.