Introduction

Geneva is an artificial intelligence tool that defeats censorship by exploiting bugs in censors, such as those in China, India, and Kazakhstan. Unlike many other anti-censorship solutions which require assistance from outside the censoring regime (Tor, VPNs, etc.), Geneva runs strictly on one side of the connection (either the client or server side).

Under the hood, Geneva uses a genetic algorithm to evolve censorship evasion strategies and has found several previously unknown bugs in censors. Geneva’s strategies manipulate the network stream to confuse the censor without impacting the client/server communication. This makes Geneva effective against many types of in-network censorship (though it cannot be used against IP-blocking censorship).

Geneva is composed of two high level components: its genetic algorithm (which it uses to evolve new censorship evasion strategies) and its strategy engine (which is uses to run an individual censorship evasion strategy over a network connection).

Geneva’s Github page contains the Geneva’s full implementation: its genetic algorithm, strategy engine, Python API, and a subset of published strategies. With these tools, users and researchers alike can evolve new strategies or leverage existing strategies to evade censorship. To learn more about how Geneva works, see How it Works.