We presented three papers at the IFIP Networking Conference in Switzerland. These papers reflect several months of dedication from our students, exploring the frontiers of satellite networking, web privacy, and global censorship.
🛰️ Understanding DNS Dynamics over the Starlink Network — led by Robert Richter, this paper provides the first measurement study of DNS performance within the Starlink LEO constellation. We find that SpaceX-operated resolvers currently offer the best performance due to their geographic proximity to Points of Presence (PoPs).
🔒 The Fragile Privacy of Encrypted Client Hello — a collaborative effort by our master’s students, led by Jannis Hajda (+ Bengin Denis Oezdil, John Bauer, and Felix Hoffmann), this paper reveals a fragile landscape of ECH deployment dominated by a single provider and identifies critical privacy leakages whereby even when a primary domain is correctly configured, subdomains frequently fail ECH negotiation, compromising the privacy of the entire page load.
🌍 The WorldWideBlock Toolkit — led by Jan Riedler, this paper crawls 40 officially published blocklists to track global censorship. Using new remote measurement tools, Jan validates >20 million anomalies to distinguish between genuine ISP-level censorship and false positives caused by server-side errors or local firewalls.
The photo at the top was taken during the conference social dinner and boat cruise on Lake Lugano, which we thoroughly enjoyed!
