Psiphon, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Screw the Nanny
A new internet censorship circumvention tool called psiphon has just been released that looks quite promising. It is somewhat akin to Tor in how it works, though it looks like there are three distinct advantages to psiphon over Tor for users in China just trying to get around Nanny.
First, Tor works by making an encrypted connection to a computer, called a Tor server, that connects to another computer, that connects to another computer, etc., until you reach the server you were actually trying to connect to that contains the website you want.
Because of this, Tor offers a high level of anonymity, but a major disadvantage of Tor—and this is readily apparent to anyone who uses Tor even the first time—is that it is dreadfully slow. The reason for this is because the request is going through all those Tor servers on the way to its final destination.
By contrast, psiphon works by making an encrypted connection directly to one computer, called a psiphonode, that in turn connects directly to the server containing the website you want. This means that psiphon should work faster than Tor, assuming the psiphonode you connect to is a reasonably fast computer with a decent internet connection and not being bogged down by an overload of psiphon requests from other users.
Second, Tor requires the user to download, install and run the Tor software on their computer, which is somewhat complicated. Psiphon, however, does not require end users to download any software at all. One only needs the url of the psiphonode and a legit username and password to use it. Once the user is logged into the psiphonode they are presented with the psiphon toolbar. One simply enters the URL they want in the toolbar and they can then view the requested site from their browser.
Third, if Tor were ever blocked, or Anonymouse or Proxzee or Coral (ie., .nyudnet:8080) or Public Proxy Servers or CNProxy.com, etc.—and the Chinese government could do this far too easily because all of these internet censorship circumvention systems rely on, indeed, require publicly known proxy servers to work—psiphon would still be available, because psiphonodes do not have to be publicly known for psiphon to work.
Think of it as a roll-your-own Anonymouse, without all the recent advertisements of naked German women.
Psiphon’s launch has been picked up by some major news sites too, such as the BBC and NYTimes.
For more information be sure to see http://psiphon.civisec.org/.
Tags psiphon, Nanny, GFW, China, Censorship
December 8, 2006 at 12:55 pm
[...] CHINA – Psiphon, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Screw the Nanny “Think of it as a roll-your-own Anonymouse, without all the recent advertisements of naked German women.” [...]
December 10, 2006 at 4:34 pm
[...] I can confirm that what I said about psiphon being faster than Tor in my previous post is true. I’ve got it running locally, and it screams. My computer (psiphonite) has to go no farther than Beihang’s (my ISP) DNS server to make a direct connection with Jinjin’s computer (psiphonode) which in turn goes out onto the internet and makes the request for whatever website I’m trying to access. Of course, psiphon would never be that fast when connecting to a psiphonode overseas, but it should still be faster than Tor. [...]
December 20, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Thanks for the heads-up. I’d been having problems understanding why Psiphon was at all preferable to Tor, but this helped. Is there a Mac client yet?
December 22, 2006 at 5:27 pm
No Mac client yet. Also, I haven’t been able to access http://psiphon.civisec.org/ without a proxy for a few days now. Is it being blocked by the GFW?
January 12, 2007 at 1:09 am
The problem with a more direct connection like what it sounds like Psiphon uses is that the people you are trying to avoid could set up fake proxies and then know exactly who you are and what sites you are visiting. In fact it would be even easier than tapping your raw network connection.
This depends heavily on trusting the node you are connected to. This is more of a “darknet” similar to what the new Freenet 0.7 is trying to do and failing miserably at. Finding someone to trust is the whole problem. How do you find a trusted node on the public Internet? It’s either wide-open where trust can’t be verified or closed so tight the general public can’t use it.
That’s why Tor is designed the way it is.
January 12, 2007 at 8:41 am
Hey Randy,
I think you are absolutely correct and I agree with you 100%. For me, however, my interest in Psiphon doesn’t stem from concerns about avoiding a malicious observer of my network activity or even pulling the wool over the eyes of “big brother”. All I’m concerned about is accessing content that is normally blocked by the Chinese firewall. Since I’m not a dissident, and since almost everything I access that is normally blocked has nothing to do with what the Chinese government fears, I don’t care if the Chinese government, or anyone else for that matter, knows what I am accessing, and would use Tor those times when I am concerned about anonymity (at the moment I always use Tor as I haven’t found a reliable psiphonode yet). In other words, I am interested in Psiphon because of the reachibility it offers rather than the anonymity, especially if the Chinese government ever became paranoid enough to actually crack down on Tor and all publicly known anonymizing proxies.