Professor Diogo Barradas has received the 2025 FOCI Rising Star Award for his significant contributions to censorship-resistant communications. Presented at the Free and Open Communications on the Internet conference, the FOCI Rising Star Award honours early-career researchers whose work advances Internet freedom.
“I am pleased to hear that Diogo has won a FOCI Rising Star Award,” said Raouf Boutaba, University Professor and Director of the Cheriton School of Computer Science. “His research not only develops new censorship-resistant systems, but it also demonstrates how difficult these systems are to detect by censors, complementary work that’s essential to help maintain a free and open Internet.”
Diogo Barradas is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, a member of the Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Security group, and the Associate Director of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. His research focuses on network security and privacy, with particular emphasis on statistical traffic analysis, Internet censorship circumvention and digital forensics.
He joined Waterloo as a faculty member in 2022 after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Computer Science at Rice University. He holds a PhD in Information Systems and Computer Engineering from the University of Lisbon.
While the award acknowledges Professor Barradas’s broader contributions to circumventing Internet censorship, one highlighted achievement is his recent systematization of knowledge paper, research that was presented in July at PETS 2025, the 25th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
In “SoK: The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures,” Professors Barradas and N. Asokan and their PhD student Michael Wrana present an in-depth analysis of how six leading Future Internet Architecture designs may affect the development and effectiveness of surveillance and censorship mechanisms. They examine packet structure, addressing and naming schemes, and routing protocols to foster discussion on how these new systems may interact with censorship and surveillance apparatuses.
As the Internet has grown, it has enabled widespread access to information, fostering global communication and collaboration. Alongside it, multiple technological advances have allowed network operators to more efficiently and effectively monitor and control the data that flows through their networks. Unfortunately, these same capabilities have empowered state-level actors to deploy large-scale surveillance and censorship mechanisms to monitor people’s Internet activities and restrict their access to online information.
Combating surveillance and censorship is increasingly difficult in part because of the foundational design of the Internet. The original TCP/IP architecture prioritized usability and flexibility over privacy and security, under the assumption that all parties would be trustworthy. Over time, however, the expectation of trust evaporated, requiring security enhancements to be applied retroactively to protect against attacks. Further compounding the problem is the growth of Internet-connected devices and the lack of available Internet protocol addresses.
To address these challenges, researchers have proposed multiple initiatives to overhaul the Internet by applying the lessons learned from 30 years of network engineering experience. Known as Future Internet Architectures, these initiatives seek to remove the limitations of TCP/IP by improving performance, scalability and mobility while accommodating much-needed privacy and security features.
In their systemization of knowledge paper, Professor Barradas and his collaborators explore how these Future Internet Architectures could both help and hinder efforts to preserve online privacy and free access to information. They find that enhanced functionality in intermediate routers and richer packet header fields in prominent Future Internet Architectures may unintentionally help state-level actors deploy fine-grained surveillance and censorship mechanisms. Although Future Internet Architecture proposals incorporate security improvements, they generally do not focus specifically on resisting surveillance or censorship and, moreover, many have not been empirically validated.
The researchers suggest promising directions for continuing research into Future Internet Architecture–based privacy enhancing technologies, and offer guidelines for how best to evaluate these tools and techniques.
To learn more about the highlighted research on which this article is based, please see Michael Wrana, Diogo Barradas, N. Asokan. SoK: The Spectre of Surveillance and Censorship in Future Internet Architectures. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. 2025(2): 494–511.