Decentralized Control: A Case Study of Russia

Paper (NDSS’20) / Report

Unlike other censoring countries such as China and Iran, very little is known about Russia’s censorship practices. We collaborated with activists and developed new measurement methods to capture the information control ecosystem of Russia. Our work was covered by 80+ news agencies around the world: ABC / NYT / WP / AP / CPJ / Japan / China / Taiwan.

Censored Planet

Project Site

To protect freedom of speech, there must be a way to independently detect if something has been censored. Our platform uses remote measurement techniques to collect and publish such data, weekly, for more than 150 countries. The platform has detected surreptitious censorship involving Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.

ISP-Scale DDoS Mitigation
Poster (UMich UROP Symposium)

Internet service providers are susceptible to DDoS attacks, leading to user downtimes and network congestion. We worked with real-world Internet traffic data, coming from Merit’s 4000 miles of Internet fiber-optic infrastructure, to explore DNS-side DDoS detection and enhance the existing network monitoring software (AMON).

Voting Machine Forensic Analysis
Report

Wiped voting machines can be found on online shopping platforms such as eBay, possibly to recover some election costs. We tore apart a used WinVote and iVotronic for forensic analysis. Although we did not discover any groundbreaking security flaws, this phenomenon remains deeply concerning. Covered in UMich News.