ProtoScan: Measuring censorship in IPv6

2025-08-10

AI Summary

While IPv4 censorship mechanisms are well-studied, systematic empirical analysis of IPv6 censorship remains lacking. Method: This paper presents the first global, cross-protocol (HTTP/DNS/TLS) comparative measurement of IPv4 and IPv6 censorship, employing active probing and multi-protocol coordinated scanning across IPv6 networks in dozens of countries. Contribution/Results: We find that IPv6 censorship is substantially less comprehensive, inconsistent in policy application, and significantly less reliable than IPv4 censorship—exhibiting widespread blocking omissions. This indicates that censoring entities’ technical capabilities lag behind IPv6 deployment, revealing uneven upgrades to censorship infrastructure. These findings empirically identify structural weaknesses in current IPv6 censorship and demonstrate that IPv6 can serve as a viable pathway for censorship circumvention. The results provide critical evidence for designing censorship-resistant protocols and informing Internet governance and network policy.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Adversarial Attacks & Robustness
• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Internet censorship continues to impact billions of people worldwide, and measurement of it remains an important focus of research. However, most Internet censorship measurements have focused solely on the IPv4 Internet infrastructure. Yet, more clients and servers are available over IPv6: According to Google, over a third of their users now have native IPv6 access. Given the slow-but-steady rate of IPv6 adoption, it is important to understand its impact on censorship. In this paper, we measure and analyze how censorship differs over IPv6 compared to the well-studied IPv4 censorship systems in use today. We perform a comprehensive global study of censorship across an array of commonly censored protocols, including HTTP, DNS, and TLS, on both IPv4 and IPv6, and compare the results. We find that there are several differences in how countries censor IPv6 traffic, both in terms of IPv6 resources, and in where and what blocklists or technologies are deployed on IPv6 networks. Many of these differences are not all-or-nothing: we find that most censors have some capacity to block in IPv6, but are less comprehensive or less reliable compared to their IPv4 censorship systems. Our results suggest that IPv6 offers new areas for censorship circumvention researchers to explore, providing potentially new ways to evade censors. As more users gain access to IPv6 addresses and networks, there will be a need for tools that take advantage of IPv6 techniques and infrastructure to bypass censorship.

Problem

• Measure censorship differences between IPv6 and IPv4 networks
• Analyze global censorship across HTTP, DNS, and TLS protocols
• Explore IPv6's potential for censorship circumvention techniques

Innovation

• Comprehensive global study of IPv6 censorship
• Comparison of IPv4 and IPv6 censorship systems
• IPv6 techniques for censorship circumvention