FOE the Release of Feed over Email

Architecture and Background

Sho Ho - FOE The Release of Feed Over Email, a Solution to Feed Controversial News to Censored Countries Many repressive countries have created Internet censorship systems to prevent Internet users from accessing websites that are deemed inappropriate by their officials.

Vulnerability Analysis

In many cases, these websites are news, political, or religion websites and the main purpose for the ban is to protect the interest of the country's political parties.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

FOE is a new censorship circumvention tool developed in-house by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (the Federal Government agency that oversees and supports the operations of Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Farda, andRadio, etc.) FOE allows Internet users to get RSS feeds and/or download small files without needing proxy servers.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

The main goals for the FOE project is to create a multi-platform architecture that allows Internet users to receive unbiased news and to give developers a tool to create new censorship circumvention programs. Sho Ho had been a freelance software developer for about 10 years and recently joined the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Federal Government agency that oversees and supports broadcasters such as Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, etc. Sho is a member of the Internet anti-censorship team at BBG whose duties include developing and managing anti-censorship technologies to help Internet users in censored countries to bypass Government censorships. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 18 Archive here: