Internet censorship by authoritarian governments prohibits free and open access to information for millions of people around the world. Attempts to evade such censorship have turned into a continually escalating race to keep up with ever-changing, increasingly sophisticated internet censorship. Censoring regimes have had the advantage in that race, because researchers must manually search for ways to circumvent censorship, a process that takes considerable time. New work led by University of Maryland computer scientists could shift the balance of the censorship race. The researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns how to circumvent censorship.

Internet censorship, basically, is a very effective strategy used by dictatorial governments to limit access to information available online for controlling freedom of expression and prevent rebellion and discord. Countries at the forefront of adopting Internet censorship, as per the findings of the 2019 Freedom House report, are India and China as these are declared to be the worst abusers of digital freedom. Conversely, the US, Brazil, Sudan, and Kazakhstan are the countries where Internet freedom has considerably declined recently. When a country curbs Internet freedom, activists need to find ways to evade it. However, they may not need to manually search for it now that "Geneva" is here. The term is a shorter version of Genetic Evasion.

Internet censorship by authoritarian governments prohibits free and open access to information for millions of people around the world. Attempts to evade such censorship have turned into a continually escalating race to keep up with ever-changing, increasingly sophisticated internet censorship. Censoring regimes have had the advantage in that race, because researchers must manually search for ways to circumvent censorship, a process that takes considerable time. New work led by University of Maryland computer scientists could shift the balance of the censorship race. The researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns how to circumvent censorship.

New work led by University of Maryland computer scientists could shift the balance of the censorship race. The researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns how to circumvent censorship. Tested in China, India and Kazakhstan, Geneva found dozens of ways to circumvent censorship by exploiting gaps in censors' logic and finding bugs that the researchers say would have been virtually impossible for humans to find manually. The researchers will introduce Geneva during a peer-reviewed talk at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on Computer and Communications Security in London on November 14, 2019. "With Geneva, we are, for the first time, at a major advantage in the censorship arms race," said Dave Levin, an assistant professor of computer science at UMD and senior author of the paper.