POSTER: A Cyberspace Study of the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the resilience of the internet in the face of censorship through a current case study: the war between Russia and Ukraine. We focus on whether Russia, as a major Internet power, has been using its network to deny access to Ukraine (and whether the Internet is resilient enough to route around such abuse). We consider how Internet accessibility changed over the course of the first few months, considering both hard and soft failures of website access. Our result, in brief, is that there is a substantial difference in network access to sites from Ukraine between March and July 2022, but Russian ASes are not causing significant collateral damage by filtering. In addition, we present the tools and resources developed in the project, including a classifier to detect soft-failures and a new multi-protocol implementation of Traceroute to locate internet censorship.