Measuring Accessibility of Popular Websites when using ProtonVPN

Bachelor thesis (2021)

Authors

W.A. Tutuarima Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

S. Roos Data-Intensive Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
D. Spinellis Software Engineering - EEMCS (supervisor 2)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2021 Willemijn Tutuarima
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Published Date

02-07-2021

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Censorship and privacy issues have led people to use VPNs when accessing the internet. These VPNs not only try to protect their user but they are also associated with criminality and cyber attacks. Because of this, websites have started to resort to blacklisting the IP addresses that are used by the VPNs, thus blocking both genuine and malicious users. This forces users to sacrifice privacy for accessibility. This paper provides a method on how to measure the amount of blocking that VPN users experience and to be able to determine what type of blocking is occuring. This method is then used in an experiment using a web crawler where nodes from ProtonVPN are used to measure the amount of blocking that occurs while browsing the internet’s most popular websites. This experiment shows that on average 1.12% of the domains perform some type of blocking directed towards the VPN user and that the majority of this blocking consists of a total block, which means that the user is entirely excluded from any use of the website. Next to this it is shown that not all VPN nodes show the same amount of blocking and that there was no large difference in blocking found between days while using the same VPN node. It also shows that the categories which perform the most blocking are Business, Online Shopping and News.