YNOT – A unique project under development by the University of Michigan and the University of Waterloo in Canada teases a possible end-run around internet censorship.

Presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in San Francisco, the program — called Telex — could “make it virtually impossible for a censoring government to block individual sites by essentially turning the entire web into a proxy server,” according to Gizmag.com.

Arriving at blocked sites via traditional proxy servers “creates a kind of cat and mouse game,” J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at University of Michigan said. By tracking internet traffic patterns, censors have become quite adept at ferreting out and blocking proxy servers, only to have them pop up again somewhere else, restarting the whole cyberspace arms race.

Telex, on the other hand, uses secure connections to unblocked websites to obscure the end-user’s actual destination. The process requires end-users to install a piece of software on their computers that “talks” to Telex stations operated by internet service providers located outside the censoring region. The Telex stations decode “secret tags” in the page-header requests sent by the end-user’s software and surreptitiously reroute the browser, leaving behind only the original request as a decoy.

The trick that makes the system work is public-key steganography.

“Steganography is hiding the fact that you’re sending a message at all,” Halderman said. “We’re able to hide it in the cryptographic protocol so that you can’t even tell that the message is there.”

The Telex paradigm “would likely require support from nations that are friendly to the cause of a free and open internet,” he noted. “The problem with any one company doing this, for example, is they become a target. It’s a collective action problem. You want to do it on a wide scale that makes connecting to the internet almost an all-or-nothing proposition for the repressive state.”

So far Telex seems to be perking along very well: The researchers have set up demos of the system and even have used it to allow a Chinese client to access YouTube, which is on the Chinese government’s ever-growing blacklist.

“The internet has the ability to catalyze change by empowering people through information and communication services,” Halderman said. “Repressive governments have responded by aggressively filtering it. If we can find ways to keep those channels open, we can give more people the ability to take part in free speech and access to information.

“This has the potential to shift the arms race regarding censorship to be in favor of free and open communication.”

While empowering “free and open communication” is a laudable goal, the software also may have the ability to empower content pirates and file-traders to escape detection by the owners of the intellectual property they swipe.