Hi all,

For several reasons I've been working on a bit of code that I named "basket". It's almost at the point where the brave members of the general public should be aware that it exists as a potential option in the privacy toolbox, though using it in any capacity beyond testing on a loopback device IS CURRENTLY ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED unless users are comfortable debugging it (This means, DO NOT USE IT. I will likely break backward compatibility in the future, and you will be sad.).

"basket" is my stab at designing something that significantly increases Tor's resistance to upcoming/future attacks, by providing a link layer cryptographic handshake that uses post-quantum cryptographic primitives and defenses against website fingerprinting (and possibly e2e correlation) attacks.

For the ease of development it is in the form of a pluggable transport with the expected tradeoffs (you must absolutely trust your Bridge, since both features only run to the Bridge). It is worth noting that it is anything but subtle, and it is blatantly obvious that a given connection is speaking "basket" as no attempt was made to obfuscate the handshake.

The link layer handshake works roughly like thus: Setup: * Bob generates a long term SPHINCS256 keypair s,S used to sign responses.

The handshake: 1. Alice generates a Curve25519 keypair x,X and a NTRUEncrypt EES1171EP1 keypair n,N. 2. Alice sends X | N to Bob. 3. Bob generates a Curve25519 keypair y,Y, and calculates Curve25519(y,X) as the shared secret. 4. Bob sends NTRUEncrypt(N,Y) | S | SPHINCS256(s, ntru_ciphertext | S) to Alice. 5. Alice verifies the SPHINCS256 signature (Alice's copy of S is saved/trusted in a Trust-On-First-Use manner), and decrypts the NTRU ciphertext to obtain Y. 6. Alice calculates Curve25519(x,Y) as the shared secret.

NB: Some details omitted for brevity.

Passive attackers see Alice's Curve25519 public key, Alice's NTRUEncrypt public key, Bob's SPHINCS256 public key, a NTRUEncrypt ciphertext, and SPHINCS256 signature. Obtaining the link's ephemeral session key requires decrypting the NTRUEncrypt ciphertext (to obtain Bob's Curve25519 public key), and reversing the scalar base multiply on one of X and Y.

Active man-in-the-middle attackers need to be able to forge SPHINCS256 signatures to substitute their own NTRUEncrypt-ed payload to mount an attack (Alice's request is also validated/protected but it's one of the details omitted, read the code).

As NTRUEncrypt is patent encumbered, there also is a handshake mode that removes the experimental post-quantum cryptography and uses Ed25519/Curve25519.

The fingerprinting defenses are in the form of the CS-BuFLO algorithm in CTST (Client total, Server total) mode, without the application level hinting based optimizations to reduce bandwidth consumption (See: http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rob/papers/csbuflo.pdf). As a minor implementation refinement, "basket" uses the kernel information as described in the KIST paper to be more responsive to changing network conditions. Most of the CS-BuFLO parameters were adjusted in an attempt to compensate for the lack of said application level hinting, but "basket"'s CS-BuFLO implementation is still a lot more expensive than the one presented in the paper.

The code: http://github.com/yawning/basket

Notes: * The PQ crypto primitives used are ports to Go by yours truly based on the reference implementations. It is both possible and likely that I messed something up, so users should decide between trusting my implementations and using a handshake based on classical algorithms. * The "basket" handshake consumes a non-trivial amount of CPU on the server side due to the SPHINCS256 implementation being relatively unoptimized. * CS-BuFLO is EXTREMELY BANDWIDTH INTENSIVE, and if adversaries can observe the Bridge's upstream, it likely can be broken, especially if the Bridge is only servicing a handful of users. Running the defense end-to-end (or even to the middle relay) is *extremely* non-trivial, though that would be required if something more comprehensive is desired. * The KIST code is platform specific, and I only wrote the Linux version. If this ends up being useful to people, support for other platforms is possible. * "basket" was never written to be a general use transport, though it sits somewhere between obfsproxy-wfpadtools (a pure research framework) and obfs4proxy (something that is intended to be used in production) in terms of completeness.

Thanks to Marc Juarez (KU Leuven) and Mike Perry for inspiration to write the CS-BuFLO component of "basket".

Questions, comments, feedback appreciated as always,