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Of particular interest is image and audio data stenography - is anything is in the works for this or is it outdated?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
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