Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    Under Purityrannical Pressure: The Free Press Resolution to Information Crises
    (2023) Adams, Andrew Alan; Jaeger, Paul T; Gorham, Ursula; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Government information changed by a keystroke to serve political ends. Millions of Americans unable to access the Internet because telecom companies lobby state governments. The banning of books, closing of libraries, and criminalization of librarians suppress LGBT voices. The actions abuse power while hiding behind “fair and balanced” government information, “unfair competition” with government services, and “protecting children” from corrupting, sexual literature, making the actions purityrannical. The resolution to these crises come from an old understanding of the First Amendment’s freedom of the press, not as institutional journalists, but as an infrastructure that moves free speech through publishing, transmitting, and distributing the information to the people. The Constitution, laws and agencies passed and established by Congress, and the holdings of numerous Supreme Court cases reveal this infrastructure, but it must be formally recognized to resolve these crises and protect the First Amendment from future purityrannical attacks.
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    Automating the Discovery of Censorship Evasion Strategies
    (2022) Bock, Kevin; Levin, Dave; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Censoring nation-states deploy complex network infrastructure to regulate what content citizens can access, and such restrictions to open sharing of information threaten the freedoms of billions of users worldwide, especially marginalized groups. Researchers and censoring regimes have long engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, leading to increasingly sophisticated Internet-scale censorship techniques and methods to evade them. In this dissertation, I study the technology that underpins this Internet censorship: middleboxes (e.g. firewalls). I argue the following thesis: It is possible to automatically discover packet sequence modifications that render deployed censorship middleboxes ineffective across multiple application-layer protocols. To evaluate this thesis, I develop Geneva, a novel genetic algorithm that discovers packet-manipulation-based censorship evasion strategies automatically against nation-state level censors. Training directly against a live adversary, Geneva com- poses, mutates, and evolves sophisticated strategies out of four basic packet manipulation primitives (drop, tamper, duplicate, and fragment). I show that Geneva can be effective across different application layer protocols (HTTP, HTTPS+SNI, HTTPS+ESNI, DNS, SMTP, FTP), censoring regimes (China, Iran, India, and Kazakhstan), and deployment contexts (client-side, server- side), even in cases where multiple middleboxes work in parallel to perform censorship. In total, I present 112 client-side strategies (85 of which work by modifying application layer data), and the first ever server-side strategies (11 in total). Finally, I use Geneva to discover two novel attacks that show censoring middleboxes can be weaponized to launch attacks against innocent hosts anywhere on the Internet. Collectively, my work shows that censorship evasion can be automated and that censorship infrastructures pose a greater threat to Internet availability than previously understood.