The new Alphabet application, Intra, aims to fight against censorship caused by DNS intoxication

The Alphabet Incubator, which deals with "some of the world's most difficult security challenges," ranging from online extremism and cybersecurity to government censorship, has put in place a new tool to combat freedom of expression around the world.

Jigsaw announced Wednesday the release of a new application, Intra, designed to protect Android users from the manipulation of DNS resolutions, a practice commonly used by repressive regimes to prohibit users from gaining access to information deemed prohibited by the State.

In Iran, for example, some websites are redirected to a government censorship page because, once interviewed, Internet service providers, acting on behalf of the government, automatically return a false IP address. The same goes for the Great Firewall (GFW) of China, which returns false and often rather erroneous IP addresses in response to DNS queries addressed to government-blocked domains. Hundreds of websites are also blocked in Pakistan, and the list is long.

The manipulation of the DNS, often used in conjunction with the blocking of intellectual property, provides authoritarian governments with the means to suppress information deemed reprehensible by those in power, or unacceptable from a religious or political point of view. When a user tries to reach an Internet domain, for example ggizmodo.com, the computer asks the Domain Name System (DNS) servers for the DNS address associated with that domain. In the case of China, the GFW maintains a massive list of blacklisted domains. When a person using the Chinese Internet tries to access a blacklisted site, the GFW will not associate the domain with its actual IP address, but injects a false DNS response containing an erroneous IP address, often belonging to a chosen random website.

Intra works, according to its creators, by simply encrypting the user's connection to the DNS server. By default, it points to Google's own DNS servers (Alphabet, the parent company of Jigsaw, also owns Google), but for users who prefer to use another (IBM Cloudflare or Quad9, for example), these settings can be changed in the application.

According to CNET, DNS queries will be encrypted by default in an updated version of Android Pie. However, about 80% of Android users do not use the latest version of the Android operating system. For those, Intra is now available in Google Play.