Project Internet Measurement

I & II

Project Internet Measurement I & II

We offer projects in the fields of “Internet Censorship”, “Censorship Circumvention”, “Internet Measurement” and connected topics.

After completing project I, students can complete project II as a follow-up.

Below is a list of topics which are currently open. Don't hesitate to reach out to us, to discuss your own project ideas. All topics are available for both project I and project II.

Topics

A Tor pluggable transport layer is a component of the Tor network designed to obfuscate and disguise Tor traffic, making it more difficult for censors to detect and block.
There are several approaches to obfuscating Tor traffic by scrambling content or masquerading it as other traffic.

The goal of this project is to develop a new pluggable transport that uses a known covert channel technique.

The goal of this project is to analyze and manipulate QUIC fingerprints in order to mimic popular clients (e.g., web browsers). The student should first collect and analyze QUIC handshakes from different implementations to identify distinguishing features. Based on this analysis, a QUIC client will be modified to replicate the fingerprint of another implementation.

The project includes both measurement and implementation aspects and aims to evaluate how well modified clients can evade fingerprint-based detection.

The goal of this project is to design and implement a tool that automatically analyzes the reachability of websites and determines the type of blocking applied. The student should develop a scanner that performs a series of tests (e.g., DNS resolution, TCP connection attempts, TLS handshakes, and HTTP requests) and classifies the observed behavior.

The project combines practical networking with measurement methodology and aims to provide insights into real-world censorship techniques across different network environments.

The goal of the project is to build a tool/pipeline that allows researchers to share and analyze network traffic traces (PCAPs, flow logs, TLS metadata) without exposing sensitive user data by automatically anonymizing, sanitizing, or aggregating traffic while preserving research-relevant features. The tool should make safe sharing of real traffic feasible for security, censorship, or performance research.

The goal of the project is to build a pipeline that consumes passive DNS data and other public sources and automatically detects/classifies signs of DNS interference (NXDOMAIN hijacking, selective blocking, spoofing, injection, censorship-based DNS tampering) without actively probing or querying networks in censored regions.