Waterloo researchers develop tech to evade govt censorship, named after aliens from Doctor Who

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have developed a system that allows citizens of a country to get past government restrictions to access content on the Internet. The tool is named Slitheen, after aliens from the BBC television series, Doctor Who. The Slitheen avoid detection by disguising themselves as human. The Slitheen censorship resistance system disguises a connection to a restricted website, as that of another website, access to which is allowed. If access to Wikipedia is banned, the user will be able to browse the web site while making it appear that the connection is being used to access dank memes. The technology protects and hides the fact that the user is getting past government censorship, apart from allowing access to the blocked content. However, the researchers admit that the technologies used for avoiding government censorship has to commonly evolve to respond to new methods of enforcing restrictions.

Ian Goldberg, a professor in the David R Cheriton School of Computer Science at Waterloo, and the founding member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group at Waterloo said, “There’s always an arms race where the defender makes a better system, then the attacker makes a better system. This is what makes the research fun and interesting but also very challenging.” The system is still in development, and is expected to be available to the public by the end of the year.