As part of our ongoing commitment to achieving the highest standards of transparency and security, Psiphon commissioned 7ASecurity to conduct a security review of its code base related to four new Psiphon enhancements. The resulting report is public and can be found at: https://7asecurity.com/reports/pentest-report_psiphon-e.pdf. 

Using a “white box” approach, meaning the complete source code was available, the security team set out to determine Psiphon’s adherence to secure coding best practices, and to provide safeguard recommendations, where appropriate, based on their findings. The security team used a variety of tools and methods against all Psiphon source code and third party libraries. Network traffic was also analyzed to identify potential attack vectors, fingerprinting and Psiphon’s behaviour under attack. 

• Psiphon’s global usage surged by 1.75 Million daily unique users during the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021.
  
• The rise was particularly acute in regions where Facebook platforms - including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook itself - experience regular disruptions due to intermittent, but active censorship.
• The regions that saw the most significant increases in usage include several countries where major censorship events have occurred within the past few years: Azerbaijan, Cuba, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Mexico, Sudan, and Syria.
• Cuba showed a 4.6x increase from baseline usage, from 70,000 to over 300,000 daily unique users, reinforcing Psiphon’s important role in the region. In July 2021, the Psiphon network supported a surge of 1.4M users from Cuba during targeted blocking of social media and messaging platforms, a still-immanent threat from censors.
  
• This demonstrates that Psiphon is a key and trusted global connectivity solution.

 Supporting 5 million users in Myanmar is no small feat

When the Internet goes dark, so does communication with the rest of the world. We know that many regimes use Internet censorship as a method to suppress public awareness,  civil protest, and mobilization, and a shutdown event is often a signal of bad things to come. This means more bad news is lurking around.  When the lights of the routers went off in Myanmar, the whole world changed for millions of Burmese...