On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 5:32 PM, David Fifield david@bamsoftware.com wrote:
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the works for this or is it outdated?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/-v3Ajct-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 (: