<div dir="ltr">
<p class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-style:normal;font-variant:normal;font-weight:normal;font-stretch:normal;font-size:12px;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(69,69,69)"><br></p><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 5:32 PM, David Fifield <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:david@bamsoftware.com" target="_blank">david@bamsoftware.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><span class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-">On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 04:42:52PM -0800, Jodi Spacek wrote:<br>
> I'm a master's student at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver,<br>
> Canada) where I'm primarily researching anonymous systems and censorship. I<br>
> would be delighted to contribute to pluggable transports. <br>
><br>
> Of particular interest is image and audio data stenography - is anything is in<br>
> the works for this or is it outdated? My aim is to add this functionality while<br>
> fully testing and evaluating it as part of my thesis project. I refer to the<br>
> list of idea suggestions here: <br>
> <a href="https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/ideas" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://trac.torproject.org/pr<wbr>ojects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableT<wbr>ransports/ideas</a> <br>
<br>
</span>Circumvention research can probably learn a lot from steganography<br>
research. Most of the "mainstream" research on circumvention (read: the<br>
work I'm familiar with :D) is in CensorBib:<br>
<a href="https://censorbib.nymity.ch/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://censorbib.nymity.ch/</a><br>
However I've been meaning to see what else we can learn by bringing<br>
related research into its scope. There's a thread of research by<br>
Sebastian Zander et al. on covert channels that hardly intersects with<br>
circumvention research; it would be a good contribution if you could<br>
determine to what extent the two worlds can be joined. For example<br>
"Reliable Transmission Over Covert Channels in First Person Shooter<br>
Multiplayer Games" predates Rook and Castle. They developed an<br>
evaluation framework that to my knowledge hasn't been applied to<br>
circumvention protocols.<br>
<a href="http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/szander/cc/index.html" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/sza<wbr>nder/cc/index.html</a><br>
<a href="http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/szander/cc/cchef/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/sza<wbr>nder/cc/cchef/</a><br>
"Provably Secure Steganography" by Hopper et al. could be relevant to<br>
certain kinds of circumvention protocols.<br>
<a href="https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hoppernj/tc-stego.pdf" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~<wbr>hoppernj/tc-stego.pdf</a><br>
<br>
The traffic-obf list is a group of circumvention researchers. They are<br>
scheduling biweekly meetings on IRC. You could discuss some ideas there.<br>
<a href="https://groups.google.com/d/msg/traffic-obf/VtsKZA2Akmk/-v3Ajct-AwAJ" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://groups.google.com/d/ms<wbr>g/traffic-obf/VtsKZA2Akmk/-v3A<wbr>jct-AwAJ</a><br>
</blockquote></div><br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><p class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-p1" style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;color:rgb(69,69,69)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">This is a promising direction! I’ll look into covert channels with steganography in mind and its overlap with circumvention.<span class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></font></p><p class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-p2" style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;color:rgb(69,69,69);min-height:14px"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><br></font></p><p class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-p1" style="font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;margin:0px;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;color:rgb(69,69,69)"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif">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 (:<span class="m_-1567972521822874407gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></font></p></div></div>