With the increase in Internet censorship globally, various circumvention tools have been designed and developed. However, the monetary cost of these tools deeply impacts both user choice and the sustainability of provider operations. Recent developments in censorship circumvention research attempted to achieve cost efficiency by utilizing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) spot instances as bridges, but still incurred substantial expenses related to network connectivity and instance maintenance. In this work, we present CensorLess, a circumvention proxy that leverages the unique benefits of serverless platforms. CensorLess comprises three components:a local proxy that manages client communication and enforces serverless security constraints, a function refresher that periodically regenerates bridges, and a live migration mechanism that maintains continuous connectivity. By design, CensorLess inherits key serverless properties, which are cost efficiency, ephemerality, scalability, concurrency, and high performance. Compared to existing low-cost, state-of-the-art circumvention techniques, CensorLess reduces operational costs by 97%, while simultaneously enabling robust censorship resistance by employing bridge rotation.

The iCloud Private Relay (PR) is a new feature introduced by Apple in June 2021 that aims to enhance online privacy by protecting a subset of web traffic from both local eavesdroppers and websites that use IP-based tracking. The service is integrated into Apple’s latest operating systems and uses a two-hop architecture where a user’s web traffic is relayed through two proxies run by disjoint entities.