Rangzen: Anonymously Getting the Word Out in a Blackout

Abstract

In recent years governments have shown themselves willing to impose blackouts to shut off key communication infrastructure during times of civil strife, and to surveil citizen communications whenever possible. However, it is exactly during such strife that citizens need reliable and anonymous communications the most. In this paper, we present Rangzen, a system for anonymous broadcast messaging during network blackouts. Rangzen is distinctive in both aim and design. Our aim is to provide an anonymous, one-to-many messaging layer that requires only users' smartphones and can withstand network-level attacks. Our design is a delay-tolerant mesh network which deprioritizes adversarial messages by means of a social graph while preserving user anonymity. We built a complete implementation that runs on Android smartphones, present benchmarks of its performance and battery usage, and present simulation results suggesting Rangzen's efficacy at scale.