CensorLess: Cost-Efficient Censorship Circumvention Through Serverless Cloud Functions#

Authors: Dayeon Kang (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Jade Sheffey (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Mingshi Wu (GFW Report), Pubali Datta (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Amir Houmansadr (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

• Why: Houmansadr's group treating circumvention as a cost problem: serverless functions give you disposable, auto-scaling egress from cloud provider ranges that censors are reluctant to block wholesale. It's a systems/economics answer rather than a protocol trick, and the GFW Report co-author again signals real-adversary grounding.
• What: Apparently a circumvention design that uses serverless cloud functions as ephemeral proxies, driving per-use cost down and re-provisioning speed up so address-blocking is ineffective (title/author line only — no abstract in program).
• How: Inference: clients reach FaaS endpoints (function URLs, API gateways) that relay traffic; blocked functions are replaced cheaply, exploiting the shared, economically-entangled cloud IP space.
• Where applicable: Client tools that can reach major cloud providers; constrained by provider acceptable-use enforcement and function runtime/networking limits. Adversary economics are specific to censors that tolerate cloud IP ranges.