Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies

Fifield, David; Hardison, Nate; Ellithorpe, Jonathan; Stark, Emily; Boneh, Dan; Dingledine, Roger; Porras, Phil

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-31680-7_13

Cited by 44 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…As a comparison, Tor can provide speed ranging in 40-300 KB/s and when introducing obfuscation plugins, the speed can only reach 30-80 KB/s [13,14]. The overhead of traffic shaping is about 30%, which is similar to SkypeMorph [14].…”

Section: B Throughput Performance 1) Upper Bound Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our threat model is similar to other censorship circumvention tools [13], there are 4 objects in our model:…”

Section: A Threat Model and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Obfsproxy [12] is the first pluggable transport implementation which transforms Tor traffic to innocent-looking traffic using encryption. Flashproxy [13] uses browsers to proxy Tor traffic, and it switches its upstream peer frequently so that it's hard to be detected by the adversary. SkypeMorph [14] implemented traffic morphing for Tor and disguise Tor traffic to Skype VoIP traffic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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GoHop: Personal VPN to defend from censorship

Wang

et al. 2014

16th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology

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Abstract-Internet censorship threatens people's online privacy, and in recent years, new technologies such as high-speed Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and statistical traffic analysis methods had been applied in country scale censorship and surveillance projects. Traditional encryption protocols cannot hide statistical flow properties and new censoring systems can easily detect and block them "in the dark". Recent work showed that traffic morphing and protocol obfuscation are effective ways to defend from statistical traffic analysis. In this paper, we proposed a novel traffic obfuscation protocol, where client and server communicate on random port. We implemented our idea as an open-source VPN tool named GoHop, and developed several obfuscation method including preshared key encryption, traffic shaping and random port communication. Experiments has shown that GoHop can successfully bypass internet censoring systems, and can provide high-bandwidth network throughput.

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Section: B Throughput Performance 1) Upper Bound Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our threat model is similar to other censorship circumvention tools [13], there are 4 objects in our model:…”

Section: A Threat Model and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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GoHop: Personal VPN to defend from censorship

Wang

et al. 2014

16th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology

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“…Bridges that run the flashproxy [18] and meek [19] transports route traffic through third party web browsers and content delivery networks. The bridges and transports that are accessible in each country vary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Usability Evaluation of Tor Launcher

Lee

Fifield

Malkin

et al. 2017

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Self Cite

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Abstract:Although Tor has state-of-the art anticensorship measures, users in heavily censored environments will not be able to connect to Tor if they cannot configure their connections. We perform the first usability evaluation of Tor Launcher, the graphical user interface (GUI) that Tor Browser uses to configure connections to Tor. Our study shows that 79% (363 of 458) of user attempts to connect to Tor in simulated censored environments failed. We found that users were often frustrated during the process and tried options at random. In this paper, we measure potential usability issues, discuss design constraints unique to Tor, and provide recommendations based on what we learned to help more users connect to Tor while reducing the time they take to do so. Tor Browser incorporated the changes proposed by this study.

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“…Most notable among these is Tor [2], which, while originally designed to provide anonymity, has also seen wide use in circumvention. Other proposals include Telex [3], Infranet [4] and Ultrasurf [5] as well as several enhancements to Tor [6][7][8]. The existence of circumvention systems makes the censor's job harder: The censor must block all circumvention tools in order to remain effective.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

OSS: Using Online Scanning Services for Censorship Circumvention

Fifield

Nakibly

Boneh

2013

Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Abstract. We introduce the concept of a web-based online scanning service, or OSS for short, and show that these OSSes can be covertly used as proxies in a censorship circumvention system. Such proxies are suitable both for short one-time rendezvous messages and bulk bidirectional data transport. We show that OSSes are widely available on the Internet and blocking all of them can be difficult and harmful. We measure the number of round trips and the amount of data that can be pushed through various OSSes and show that we can achieve throughputs of about 100 KB/sec. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach we built a system for censored users to communicate with blocked Tor relays using available OSS providers. We report on its design and performance.

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Evading Censorship with Browser-Based Proxies

Cited by 44 publications

References 7 publications

GoHop: Personal VPN to defend from censorship

GoHop: Personal VPN to defend from censorship

A Usability Evaluation of Tor Launcher

OSS: Using Online Scanning Services for Censorship Circumvention

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