CensorLess: Cost-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions

2026-02-27

AI Summary

This work proposes the first censorship circumvention system built on serverless cloud platforms, addressing the high operational costs of existing tools that hinder user adoption and system sustainability. By integrating a local proxy with dynamic bridge node rotation and live migration mechanisms, the design leverages the native elasticity and concurrency of serverless infrastructure to enable efficient and persistent internet access. The approach dramatically reduces operational expenses—by 97% compared to current low-cost solutions—while simultaneously enhancing resilience against blocking. This study demonstrates, for the first time, the effective application of serverless architectures to censorship circumvention, achieving both strong scalability and robustness in adversarial network environments.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Cloud, edge and content delivery systems for the Web

Abstract

With the increase in Internet censorship globally, various circumvention tools have been designed and developed. However, the monetary cost of these tools deeply impacts both user choice and the sustainability of provider operations. Recent developments in censorship circumvention research attempted to achieve cost efficiency by utilizing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) spot instances as bridges, but still incurred substantial expenses related to network connectivity and instance maintenance. In this work, we present CensorLess, a circumvention proxy built leveraging the unique benefits of a serverless platform. CensorLess comprises three components: a local proxy that handles client-side communication and ensures compliance with serverless functions' security restrictions, a function refresher that periodically regenerates bridges, and a live migration mechanism that maintains continuous connectivity. CensorLess inherits the serverless platform's cost efficiency, ephemerality, scalability, concurrency, and performance. Compared to existing low-cost, state-of-the-art circumvention techniques, CensorLess reduces costs by 97%, while simultaneously enabling robust censorship resistance by employing bridge rotation.

Problem

• censorship circumvention
• cost efficiency
• serverless computing
• Internet censorship
• proxy systems

Innovation

• serverless
• censorship circumvention
• cost efficiency
• bridge rotation
• cloud functions