Re: [tor-dev] Pluggable transports research

Hello Jodi. I would like to point out some additional resources for you if you are interested in Pluggable Transports. First of all check out https://www.pluggabletransports.info/.

Also, some work has been done in the past on audio data as a transport. There is of course the venerable SkypeMorph (http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2012/cacr2012-08.pdf) and also SkypeLine (http://hgi.rub.de/media/attachments/files/2016/02/technical_report.pdf).

I have some general advice for implementing transports as well. Consider your threat model before you design a transport using novel techniques. See for instance the paper "Seeing Through Network-Protocol Obfuscation" (https://kpdyer.com/publications/ccs2015-measurement.pdf). Also, if you want to design a transport specifically for use with Tor, consider Tor's specific needs. Tor has specific bandwidth requirements that need to be met by the transport. Also, if you are going to attempt to mimic a protocol for an existing audio or video application, consider what networks block Tor and what audio and video applications are available on those networks. Skype, for instance, is blocked on some of the same networks as Tor, and so for those networks mimicking Skype traffic would not be an effective means to circumvent blocking.

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Will Scott <will@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Jodi,

There's some discussion of pluggable transport issues on
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/traffic-obf
that may be of interest.

In terms of stenography, you end up with a couple choices.
If you try to mimic existing protocols, you'll want to have
read up on
"The Parrot is Dead" by Houmansadr et al

In the last couple years, there were a couple prototype
transports embedding data within video games, namely
rook - https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2808141
and
castle - https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05904

I'm not aware of anything active on the image steganography
front, but I think the question remains how the activity
remains difficult to differentiate from legitimate activity.

--Will

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 04:42:52PM -0800, Jodi Spacek wrote:
> I'm a master's student at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver,
> Canada) where I'm primarily researching anonymous systems and censorship. I
> would be delighted to contribute to pluggable transports.
>
> Of particular interest is image and audio data stenography - is anything is
> in the works for this or is it outdated? My aim is to add this
> functionality while fully testing and evaluating it as part of my thesis
> project. I refer to the list of idea suggestions here:
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/ideas
>
> Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!
>
> Jodi
>
> p.s.: Please advise if this is not the correct mailing list. and perhaps
> belongs in tor-assistants. If so, I will inquire there once my access is
> (hopefully!) granted.
>
> --
> www.jodispacek.com

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