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Assessing Russia’s isolation from the web following their invasion of Ukraine using the DNS root system

Stanculeanu, G.O. (2022) Assessing Russia’s isolation from the web following their invasion of Ukraine using the DNS root system.

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Abstract:Censorship of information represents a second nature in authoritarian countries, and this has only extended to the online space, as its significance grew more with the digitalization of the world. A decade full of restrictive laws pre-date current-day Russia, a country that realized the potential of weaponizing information in the most potent medium of data propagation - the Internet. This culminated with 2022’s invasion of Ukraine, which was met with strong international backlash but little organized resistance in Russia, due to effective control of the internal narrative and suppression of outside information. This paper aims to quantify the existence of this isolation effect from a networking perspective, by using requests to DNS root servers and analyzing the path taken by such requests, in order to observe whether significant rerouting occurred after the start of the war. Other factors that might amplify the number of reroutings are path changes due to operators closing service in their country following the war or infrastructure damage. Such changes would signal the existence of network choke points and thus would open the discussion and further study of potential network isolation from the outside world.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Faculty:EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Subject:54 computer science
Programme:Computer Science BSc (56964)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/91796
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