Software to beat internet censors developed in the US

A software developed by a group of researchers led by J Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, could be helpful in beating internet censors.

The software called Telex, could in theory allow users from countries practicing internet censorship to not only get to their desired internet destination, but also allow them to keep the censors from knowing that they were trying to do so.

According to Halderman, Telex would operate in the network infrastructure, at any ISP between the censor's network and non-blocked portions of the inernet, rather than at network end points.

He adds that the approach which is called 'end-to-middle' proxying could make the system robust against countermeasures (such as blocking) by the censors.

The Telex advantage vis-à-vis other existing anti-censorship systems was the fact that the user need not get a hold of ever changing encryption keys or IP addresses for proxy servers. They would need to simply use the client software that would be made publicly available.

According to Halderman, the client would need to secretly mark the connection as a Telex request by inserting a cryptographic tag into the headers.