Nym welcomes new researcher to its censorship resistance team

Ramping up the fight against global censorship

Author: Nym

September 17, 20243 mins read

Combatting censorship is one of the biggest challenges that Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) face.

Censorship measures against privacy technologies are becoming more intense worldwide, especially in authoritarian countries. The future of VPN privacy technology will be found only in novel network designs which can circumvent them.

Recognizing that the stakes for millions of users is the freedom to information and expression, Nym is rising to the challenge by expanding its team of researchers and developers. Yesterday, Nym welcomed Jack Wampler as the newest addition to its censorship resistance team.

“Censorship resistance is important because information access is leveraged as a weapon to squash dissent and remove accountability,” Jack Wampler reminds us. “Circumvention ensures that those who need it most have the ability to: access reliable news and education materials, communicate with loved ones during times of crisis, and organize without fear of reprisal.”

Jack’s path to Nym

Jack completed his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with a focus on Privacy & Security from the ECEE department at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work explores ways to deploy solutions for security, privacy, and anonymity, especially as they involve cryptography, hardware security, and emerging internet protocols.

He is the core developer of Conjure, the first widely deployed refraction networking proxy, built primarily in Golang for censorship circumvention. Conceptually, refraction networking works by incorporating the network infrastructure (Internet Service Providers, etc.) into proxy systems to make censorship more difficult.

Jack is also actively working on rust implementations for pluggable transports and network traffic obfuscation as part of a Pluggable Transports in Rust (PTRS) project. The goals are to (1) lower the barrier to entry for writing secure pluggable transports in Rust, and (2) to implement several cutting-edge protocols using that framework.

Jack’s work at Nym

Jack is joining the Nym team as a Research and Development Specialist to help design the next generation of privacy technologies. Alongside a growing team of censorship resistance researchers and testers on the ground across the world, Jack will help Nym provide secure and safe communications for users in regions where it matters the most. This includes deploying cutting edge protocols, ensuring resistance against future cryptographic threats like quantum computing, and developing measurement techniques to understand the needs of numerous unique user-bases.

“One of the biggest challenges in community driven censorship resistance is finding ways to support your volunteer community,” Jack notes. “Nym is at this unique intersection of network privacy and web3 technologies. It has more agility than a traditional VPN, supported by the distributed nature of the network which ensures that everyone contributing is backed by the community as a whole. This is a powerful combination with huge potential for positive impact when married with circumvention technologies.”

Conclusion

Please join us in welcoming Jack to the Nym team! Fighting censorship requires the best minds and technicians, and Nym is thrilled to put Jack’s extensive expertise to work for NymVPN users worldwide. Check out his research projects here.

And stay tuned for more news this week and a new series of posts providing a deep dive on the threat of censorship today and what Nym is doing about it.