From my tweet: https://twitter.com/dougvk/status/992535371065053184
would blockstack help at all with the domain fronting // signal problem?
Muneeb replies:
Blockstack doesn’t solve this by providing support for domain fronting. Blockstack has other ways to distribute content that can potentially be censorship resistant. The explanation can be a good forum post.
Would love to hear more! @jude
Hey @dougvk,
Blockstack’s naming layer, PKI, and storage routing state are replicated to each Blockstack node irrevocably, so as long as you can reach any Blockstack peer, you can at the very least get a user’s public key and list of Gaia hub URLs. This is the state of the world today.
Something we are working on is making it possible to distribute the entire application within Blockstack’s peer network, so each Blockstack node has a full copy of all applications. Replicating the application this way is expensive and slow (by design–we only want apps that need it to be deployed this way), but it’s something we’d like to support.
I recommend taking a look at this thread for details: Censorship resistant Blockstack Apps to avoid being shutdown like Telegram in Russia, and Video Chat apps in the Middle East
In the specific case of Signal, one option would be to implement and replicate a Signal relay network node this way, so each Blockstack Core node has a copy of the code. Users would load and run the relay node code at will. The developer could periodically broadcast routing hints and node directories as part of application updates (i.e. this information would flood the Blockstack network, so all connected users would see message routing updates). The adversary would need to be adaptive in order to censor this, since they’d be forced to actively monitor the presence of Blockstack nodes in order to partition them from one another and censor routes. This isn’t impossible (China does this to block Tor, for example), but it is somewhat more difficult than simply blocking AWS wholesale.