The State of Internet Censorship in Egypt

Circumvention tool sites

A number of web proxies and circumvention tool sites were found to be blocked, making censorship circumvention harder in Egypt. The findings are summarized in the following table.

Many other circumvention tool sites also presented network anomalies as part of the testing, but we have limited the findings to those that presented the highest ratio of anomalies in comparison to the amount of times that they were tested throughout this study.

Popular censorship circumvention tools are among the blocked sites, such as torproject.org, hotspotshield.com and psiphon.ca. Subdomains of torproject.org – such as bridges.torproject.org and ooni.torproject.org – were blocked as well. Egyptian ISPs don’t appear to limit their blocking to censorship circumvention tool sites, since they also appear to block access to the Tor network as well.

Blocking of Tor

The Tor network offers online anonymity, privacy and censorship circumvention, and has therefore become a target of censorship by several governments around the world. In such countries, users can circumvent the blocking and connect to the Tor network through the use of Tor bridges. As part of this study, we analyzed network measurements collected from Egypt through the use of OONI’s Vanilla Tor and Bridge Reachability tests, which are designed to measure the blocking of the Tor network and the default bridges part of Tor Browser.

Most of the recent Vanilla Tor measurements have primarily been collected from two networks: Link Egypt (AS24863) and Telecom Egypt (AS8452). These measurements suggest that the Tor network is inaccessible, since the tests weren’t able to bootstrap connections to the Tor network within 300 seconds. In recent months, more than 460 measurements collected from these networks show connections to the Tor network consistently failing, strongly suggesting that access to it is blocked. Similarly, measurements collected from Etisalat Misr (AS36992), Mobinil (AS37069) and Vodafone (AS36935) indicate that access to the Tor network is blocked, since many attempted connections have been unsuccessful over the last year and a half. The Tor bootstrap process is likely being disrupted via the blocking of requests to directory authorities.

Few bridge reachability measurements have been collected from Egypt, limiting our ability to examine their potential blocking more extensively over time and across networks. These measurements were collected in June 2017 from the Telecom Egypt (AS8452) and Vodafone (AS36935) networks. Vodafone appears to be blocking obfs4 (shipped as part of Tor Browser), since all attempted connections were unsuccessful (though it remains unclear if private bridges work). All measurements collected from Telecom Egypt show that obfs4 works.