CacheBrowser

What is CacheBrowser?

CacheBrowser is a system designed to help Internet users bypass Internet censorship. The core idea of CacheBrowser is to grab censored content cached by Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai and CloudFlare directly from their CDN edge servers, therefore, foiling censors' DNS interference. To learn more about CacheBrowser's design details, properties, and limitations see our design paper published at ACM CCS 2015.

How Are We Different?

Regular censorship resistance systems like Tor, Psiphon, Ultrasurf, and VPN systems deploy various kinds of proxy servers (e.g., run by volunteers or other third-parties) in order to bypass censors who blacklist IP addresses. By contrast, CacheBrowser makes use of no third-party proxies! It directly downloads censored content from CDN edge servers, therefore, offering unique security and performance advantages over regular censorship resistance systems.

Which Pages Are Supported?

Unlike regular circumvention systems, CacheBrowser is not a generic circumvention system: it can only browse censored pages that are Hosted on a shared CDN (such as Akamai, Fastly, CloudFlare, etc.) Support HTTPS Fortunately, many websites already satisfy both of the conditions. If you are a content publisher, you can easily make your website CacheBrowsable by hosting it on a shared CDN network (this will also improve your site's reliability, QoS, and security). The website you are viewing right now satisfies both requirements and will always be available through CacheBrowser.

What's New?

CacheBrowser is in active development mode. However, you can download the latest version of our tool and check it out. Use it at your own risk! We're still working on improving the tools' performance and security. If you want to help us in any way let us know.

Who Are We?

CacheBrowser has been designed and developed by the SPIN research group at UMass Amherst. Contact amir@cs.umass.edu for questions or comments.