Future Challenges of ICT industry

After Years of Censorship in Tunisia

Malek Hakim
CS313: Networking and Telecommunication
Computer Science Department at Winona State University

Abstract:
Tunisia was the first Arab and African country to connect to Internet in 1992[1]. It
presents one of the advanced telecoms, broadband markets and use of ICT in the area.
The country is experiencing many reforms in telecommunication right after the
revolution that emerged in the beginning of January 2011. People protested for more
rights and freedom of speech, which was almost nonexistent. Our interest is on the
Internet censorship that dictator Zine El-Abidine was using especially by filtering many
contents online. This paper will cover an overview about the telecom infrastructure in
Tunisia and the technical parts that the government was using for filtering and monitoring
as well as the techniques used by Tunisians to overcome the censorship. On the other
part, we will switch gears and explain the role that is and will play the Internet Exchange
Point TunIXP. Before the revolution, ATI, the Tunisian Internet Agency was wrongly
considered for years as an Internet regulatory authority and was acting as a surveillance
machine. After the revolution, ATI turned off its censorship history and started its
transformation into a real IXP with regards to the international best practices. We will
discuss also what are the future economical challenges that this IXP will be achieving.

Outline:
1. Introduction
a. Why Tunisia
2. The Tunisian ecosystem
a. Timeline and background
b. Domestic and international connectivity
3. Censorship before the Tunisian revolution
a. Filtering Techniques used by the government
b. Proxy servers
c. Tor usage
d. MIAB Protocols
4. Introduction of TunIXP
a. What is an Internet Exchange Point
b. Benefits to Tunisia as an emerging market
5. Conclusion

1. Introduction
In this introduction, some of the reasons will be presented to justify the choice of
Tunisia as the main subject of this paper. First of all, Tunisia is a great example
for our as a model of countries that switched from a complete oppressing and
Internet censorship to a country where freedom of Speech is preserved. Second,
Tunisia gave birth to the Arab spring through its Tunisian Revolution in January
2011. It was fueled by the use of social medias where the protests were being
organized and supported through online networks (The use was mainly on Twitter
and Facebook since other social networks, video-sharing and blogs such as
Youtube, Dailymotion, Amnesty International website..). The main reasons of
these insurrections were seeking for more freedom of speech as well as the high
rate of unemployment. Third, Tunisia has one of the most advanced ICT
infrastructures in Africa. The World Economic Forum ranked the country 50th in
2011 in term of global ICT competitiveness and 2nd behind the United Arab
Emirates in the MENA region[2]. The information revolution offers Africa a
dramatic opportunity to leapfrog into the future, breaking out of decades of
stagnation or decline. Fourth, Information communication technology sector
might be a solution for the economical challenges that encounter the country and
especially for solving unemployment problems. Internet businesses are cheap; the
perfect fit for a country with lots of human capital and very little cash. Some
projects are thinking about transforming Tunisia to an India for French-speaking
countries. Tunisia aims to become an internationally competitive player in the
global market in term of ICT industry. [3]

2. The Tunisian Ecosystem

The beginning of Internet in Tunisia was back to 1991, when the first that was
established a full IP connectivity with the Internet and was hence the first country in
Africa and Middle East to get a fully IP connected Internet node. This project was
conducted with collaboration with National Science Foundation (NSF) in USA and
INRIA research center in France[4]. Let us take a detailed look about the background of
telecommunication.

a. Timeline and Background

Telecommunication in Tunisia is centralized in a telecommunication facility.
Before 1995, Internet was totally controlled by the government. In 1995, the government
created TT (Tunisie Telecom) which the incumbent telecom operator. In April 1996, the
ministry of Communication established the Tunisian Internet Agency (known by its
French acronym ATI) to regulate the country's Internet and domain name system (DNS)
services[5]. it is a whole-saler of connectivity. Everything related to Internet is within the
framework of ATI. The years between 1997 and 2000, where the years when the internet
market was opened to competiveness, giving licenses to 5 privates ISPs which were given
fixed and mobile 2G/3G licenses starting from 2002. These following years, the telecom
sector witnessed market Liberalization. Before 2011, and the Tunisian uprising, Internet
traffic which was routed via a unique ASN (AS2609) via the ATI router and operated by
TT and in October 2012, Orange Tunisia a private operator started routing its internet
traffic through its own IP transit gateway (AS37492). In January 2013, TunIXP was

lunched (we will talk further in this paper for the reason of this political decision). In the
same year, ATI hosted an L-root DNS Server, one of the thirteen root name servers
operated by ICANN. [6]

b. Domestic and International connectivity

Internet Access in Tunisia is available through domestic fiber-optic backbone, in
terms of international access through submarine cables, terrestrial access through a cable
connecting Tunisia with Algeria and Libya, and satellite links through VSAT satellite
technology.
Domestic:
TT operates 10,000 km fiber-optic backbone[2] covering the whole country with a
very high bandwidth using SDH protocol (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) and DWDM
(Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing). Since TT is owned by the Tunisian State it
was easy to use national infrastructures in electricity and gas grid, the national railroad
infrastructure and the national highway infrastructure, to deploy its backbone. The ATI
presents to be the gateway from which all the eleven Internet service providers (ISPs)
lease their bandwidth. Seven of them are public operated and five of them are private. All
these ISPs use Tunisie Telecom's national backbone. Also, there is two more cell
operators that owns 3G licenses, Orange Tunisia and Ooredoo (Previously named
Tunisiana), which hold 64% of the market. [7]
International:
Tunisia is connected physically through two landline stations, one of them is the
SEA-ME-WE4 which provide provides the primary Internet backbone between South
East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe. After the launch of

TUNIXP many reforms were done when we come to international connectivity.[2]

Internet links are with Italia Telecom Sparkle (AS6762) / Level3 Communications
(AS3356) / the Britsh Interoute Communications (AS8928) / Orange SA (AS5511)
troughout TT operating with four submarine cables since 2013. Also Internet connectivity
is done through terrestrial cable Ibn Khaldoun linked with Algeria and Libya to
improve general connectivity. The total International bandwidth is 62 Gbit/s in 2012[8]

-Graph showing the International and domestic connectivity of Internet in Tunisia [5] .

3. Censorship before the Tunisian Revolution

Censorship was always in issue in Tunisia and passed from repressing the classic medias
like newspapers since the independence of the country in 1956 to the new digital forms of
media especially on Internet with Ben Alis Regime. To achieve censorship system, many
governments had to refer to the idea of having a single number of entry points. In this

part, we will try to highlight the technique used by the government in censorship and the
techniques used by Internet users to overcome it.

a. Filtering Techniques used by the government

Using the pretense of libel or the accusation of disrupting the public order, many
blogs and websites were censored. The government was using filtering techniques
especially using DPI (Deep packet inspection)[9], a method that threatens privacy through
analyzing data and the header of packets. Deep packet inspection (DPI) is an advanced
method of packet filtering those functions at the Application layer of the OSI (Open
Systems Interconnection) reference model. The use of DPI makes it possible to find,
identify, classify, reroute or block packets with specific data or code payloads that
conventional packet filtering, which examines only packet headers, cannot detect. [10]
DPI infrastructure in Tunisia is mainly provided by the American vendor Blue Coat
System. [11] Filtering was costing, according to some figure from the ATI, previously was
the agency responsible on all the surveillance operations, that these costs have amounted
to over 1 million Tunisian dinars per year (at the time around 570.000 Euros) since 2007,
rising to around 3.6 million Tunisian dinars (at the time around 2 million Euros) in 2010.
[5]

The commercial filtering product is called SmartFilter. It has a pre-defined database of

content to be blocked including Anonymizers, Nudity, Pornography, and Sexual

Materials. [12] When landing to a blocked page, the censor was using a fake error page.
The standard showed message was "404 Not Found" error, instead of the "403
Forbidden" error generated by the system of Smartfilter. This makes filtering more
opaque and clouds users understanding of the boundaries of permissible content. [13]
Also, if the censor suspects that a communication of content was made through hidden

message in videos on Youtube for example, "Ammar 404", like it was called by most
activist, was blocking access to the website rather than re-encoding every video which
takes a high toll of computation. Furthermore, Tunisian were using separate surveillance
infrastructure providing my many multinational companies like the German Ultimaco,
Nokia Siemens Networks, Trovicor, ETI (a subsidiary of BAE Systems) and NetApp.
Tunisia was used as a "test bed" for these different companies in terms of censorship and
surveillance technologies. Like presented by the actual ATI CEO Moez Chakchouk, the
previous regime was giving substantial discount to these corporations in order to "try out"
their technologies on a large scale. Lets look for the techniques used by Internet users in
order to bypass censorship.

b. Proxy Servers
In 2010, a report from Harvards Center for Internet & Society[14] shows that 7 of
the 11 tools with at least 250,000 unique monthly users are simple web proxies. One of
the easiest techniques that were used by Tunisian Internet users to overcome censorship
is to use the available web proxies online which did the government not blacklist. A web
proxy is a server-side application accessed through the web. It plays the role as an
intermediate for the client requests. It refers to the seventh layer of the OSI reference
model (Application layer) as opposite to the Network Address Translation (NAT) part of
the third layer of the OSI reference model which is a technique of modifying network
address information in the IP datagram packet headers while transiting across the network
in order to remap one IP address into another.

Illustrated concept of a proxy server. A client ("Alice") asks a computer running a service
("Bob") for the current time, using a proxy server as an intermediary.

c. Tor Usage:
One of the highly used techniques for online anonymity in the oppressive
countries is the use of the tor routers. Tor users in Tunisia were increasing before the
upraising of January [15][16], the usage was never been very high during the last months
before the revolution when a lot of activists like Slim Amamou[17] where arrested and the
need of using anonymous network in order to share content of protests in the social
medias without being under surveillance by the government.

This is graph of Tor clients directly connecting to the rest of the network[15]

Tor stands for the The Onion Router". At the US Navy research
Laboratory, Paul Syverson created it build on the work of the cryptographer David
Chaum. A user wants to visit a website but they doesnt want to reveal their IP address.
As they send the request, three layer of encryption are placed around it like the layers of
an onion. The message is then sent through a series of computers, which had volunteered
to act as relay points. As the message passes from computer to computer, a layer of
encryption is removed. Each time is removed. All the relay computers can see is an order,
which tells it to pass the message on. A final computer relay decrypts the innermost layer
of encryption, revealing the content of communication. Thus, the identity of the user is
always hidden.[18]

However, in most of the censoring countries like Tunisia as well as in China or Iran,
governments are used to know Tor IP addresses and blocked them.[19] This make the use
of Tor not being possible, user can even be identified as Tor users. To overcome this
problem, Internet users deal with Tor bridges, or also called Tor bridge relays which are
an alternative entry points to the Tor network that are not all listed publicly. Using a

bridge makes it harder, but not impossible, for the ATI, or any ISP to identify the use of
Tor.

This is a graph of Tor clients connecting through bridges to the rest of the network[16]
Nawaat.org, an independent collective blog founded by a set of activist and
journalists lunched an anonymous whistleblowing platform in order to support
transparency and corruption. The platform was evolving multiple open source
applications and techniques based on the GlobaLeaks platform and Tor technology which
protects the senders and the team working in the website from being identified. Also,
Sami Ben Gharbia, one of the co-founders of Nawaat.org, founded TuniLeaks, as an
exclusive Tunisian Wikileaks, where he published to public all cables issued from the
local US Embassy and the reveals its exchanges with the US Department of State about
the corruption of Tunisia's President's family. The website was rapidly blocked by the
government by its domain name (tunileaks.appspot.com without the https) then blocked
the Google App Engine's IP Address (209.85.229.141) in order to block Tunileaks under
https as well. [20] Now, after the end of censorship, the ATI, the agency responsible in

filtering, announced an opening of a new Tor proxy server in Tunisia as a symbol of

online freedom. Internet users worldwide are nowadays able to connect anonymously
through the Tunisian network and bypass censorship in their countries. [11]

d. MIAB Protocol:
Other ways of communicating and bypassing censorship exists. The method presented is
a method that allows a given person Alice who lives in a country ruler by an oppressive
regime to communicate confidentially with a second person Bob who lives in another
country. This method is called Message In A Bottle (MIAB).[21] Alice does not need to
know any information, but Bobs public key. In MIAB, Alice will prepare a message for
Bob and encrypt it with his public key. This ciphertext will be steganographically
embedded in some digital photos. Steganography is the art and science of hiding
information by embedding messages within other. Bob is monitoring some of the ping
servers, looking for steganographic content encrypted with his public
A blog ping is a message sent from a blog to a centralized network service (a ping server)
to notify the server of new or updated content. Search engines use blog pings to
efficiently index new content in real time. The graph below illustrates better the concept.

4. Introduction of TunIXP:
For many years and after its creation in 1996, ATI was wrongly acting as a censorship
machine instead of being used as an organization for Internet development in Tunisia.
Right after the Tunisian Upraising in 2011, ATI turned off its dark surveillance and
censorship history and reformed its whole structure. In 2013, it operated TunIXP
(AS37551), the first Tunisian Internet Exchange Point in the region. It provides IP
connectivity to ISP, operators and data centers. [22]

a. What is an Internet Exchange Point:

We know that Internet is a collection of networks interconnected. It shapes different
patterns and topologies. The way we interconnect our networks may influence many
factors like the cost, the latency and support economy. One of the solutions is IXPs. An
Internet Exchange Point is a network infrastructure with the purpose to facilitate the
exchange of Internet traffic between Autonomous Systems.[23] It requires three or more
members. The objective of IXPs is peering which is voluntary interconnect network with
no cost as opposite to transit which is not free. In other words, IXPs are a simply physical
location where different networks meet to exchange traffic with each other with copper or
fiber cables interconnecting their equipment, usually via one or more Ethernet switches
using a common protocol IP in order to keep local traffic being local [24]

This is a graph is explaining architecture of Internet using IXPs (seen in purple here)

b. Benefits to Tunisia as an emerging market:

Like previously mentioned, there are currently eleven ISP in Tunisia, six public
(ATI, INBMI, CCK, CIMSP, IRESA and Defense ISP) and five private (Planet Tunisie,
3S Global Net, Hexabyte, Topnet and Tunet). Before the launch of TunIXP, assuming
that an end-user subscribed with one of these ISPs would like to send a simple email from
Tunisia, data should be routed to Europe before coming back to Tunisia. Using IXP make
the date being routed locally using peering. [25] It provide less latency. It avoid the
contengency of the international capacity and it impacts positively on it letting the access
to it easier from local users. In this respect, IXPs help to encourage the development of
local telecom infrastructure such as national and international fibre cables. Furthermore,
ISP are able to cooperate and compete because it creates an Interconnected point. Today
TunIXP is counting Af-IX and Euro-IX as members. A various of shared services are
possible to be hosted within the IXP. For instance, ATI annonced Mirror.tn, the first
tunisian open source mirror. This mirror will cache intensive international content
through content delivery networks like Akamai or Google Global Cache for example.

These static caches can be hosted in the exchange point. Furthermore, thanks to all these
services, IXPs will create a more robuste and independant infrastructure that may
encourage creating new employment opportunities like experienced Argentina and Kenya
because local developers were having more ability to create their local contents and
contribute in business continuity. [26]

5. Conclusion
This paper presented a model of countries that experienced a change in the Internet
infrastructure model and focused especially on the political choices to switch from using
Internet infrastructure for online surveillance to using it for the growth of the local
economy. We presented the Tunisian ecosystem as well as the situation before and after
the Tunisian revolution in January 2011.

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