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 the works for this or is it outdated?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/PluggableT ransports/ideas
Circumvention research can probably learn a lot from steganography
research. Most of the "mainstream" research on circumvention (read: the
work I'm familiar with :D) is in CensorBib:
https://censorbib.nymity.ch/
However I've been meaning to see what else we can learn by bringing
related research into its scope. There's a thread of research by
Sebastian Zander et al. on covert channels that hardly intersects with
circumvention research; it would be a good contribution if you could
determine to what extent the two worlds can be joined. For example
"Reliable Transmission Over Covert Channels in First Person Shooter
Multiplayer Games" predates Rook and Castle. They developed an
evaluation framework that to my knowledge hasn't been applied to
circumvention protocols.
http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/szander/cc/index.html
http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/szander/cc/cchef/
"Provably Secure Steganography" by Hopper et al. could be relevant to
certain kinds of circumvention protocols.
https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hoppernj/tc-stego.pdf
The traffic-obf list is a group of circumvention researchers. They are
scheduling biweekly meetings on IRC. You could discuss some ideas there.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/traffic-obf/VtsKZA2Akmk/-v3A jct-AwAJ
This is a promising direction! I’ll look into covert channels with steganography in mind and its overlap with circumvention.
Actually, I just finished reading your thesis - it’s an excellent resource for navigating related works and comprehending the interplay of circumvention and censorship. Thanks very much for the additional links (:
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