SymBiosis: Anti-Censorship and Anonymous Web-Browsing Ecosystem

Abstract

Existing anti-censorship and anonymizing systems like Tor rely on volunteers who run relays. In reality, the most challenging part, however, is to gather enough volunteers beyond altruism. There have been a few incentive schemes for volunteering, but they require external monetary resources or e-cash infrastructure. This paper presents SymBiosis, a web-browsing cosystem that makes a case for direct benefit trading between censored users and uncensored users for their own resources. The two-way interaction in SymBiosis makes every user benefit (anonymity) from participation (relay), and in turn leads to a near-perfect circumvention system via ubiquitous relay deployment. On top of this, SymBiosis provides a practical relay structure, optimized for users’ web-browsing experience. SymBiosis is fully implemented and tested in a real-world environment. The evaluation demonstrates that SymBiosis achieves both goals against today’s most advanced censor systems and delivers usable performance for everyday web browsing.