Pluggable transports research
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 Of particular interest is image and audio data stenography - is anything is in the works for this or is it outdated?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 Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much! Jodi p.s.: Please advise if this is not the correct mailing list. and perhaps belongs in tor-assistants. If so, I will inquire there once my access is (hopefully!) granted. -- www.jodispacek.com
Hi Jodi, There's some discussion of pluggable transport issues on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/traffic-obf that may be of interest. In terms of stenography, you end up with a couple choices. If you try to mimic existing protocols, you'll want to have read up on "The Parrot is Dead" by Houmansadr et al In the last couple years, there were a couple prototype transports embedding data within video games, namely rook - https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2808141 and castle - https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05904 I'm not aware of anything active on the image steganography front, but I think the question remains how the activity remains difficult to differentiate from legitimate activity. --Will 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Of particular interest is image and audio data stenography - is anything is in the works for this or is it outdated?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
Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!
Jodi
p.s.: Please advise if this is not the correct mailing list. and perhaps belongs in tor-assistants. If so, I will inquire there once my access is (hopefully!) granted.
-- www.jodispacek.com
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Hello Jodi. I would like to point out some additional resources for you if you are interested in Pluggable Transports. First of all check out https://www.pluggabletransports.info/. Also, some work has been done in the past on audio data as a transport. There is of course the venerable SkypeMorph ( http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2012/cacr2012-08.pdf) and also SkypeLine ( http://hgi.rub.de/media/attachments/files/2016/02/technical_report.pdf). I have some general advice for implementing transports as well. Consider your threat model before you design a transport using novel techniques. See for instance the paper "Seeing Through Network-Protocol Obfuscation" ( https://kpdyer.com/publications/ccs2015-measurement.pdf). Also, if you want to design a transport specifically for use with Tor, consider Tor's specific needs. Tor has specific bandwidth requirements that need to be met by the transport. Also, if you are going to attempt to mimic a protocol for an existing audio or video application, consider what networks block Tor and what audio and video applications are available on those networks. Skype, for instance, is blocked on some of the same networks as Tor, and so for those networks mimicking Skype traffic would not be an effective means to circumvent blocking. On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Will Scott <will@wills.co.tt> wrote:
Hi Jodi,
There's some discussion of pluggable transport issues on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/traffic-obf that may be of interest.
In terms of stenography, you end up with a couple choices. If you try to mimic existing protocols, you'll want to have read up on "The Parrot is Dead" by Houmansadr et al
In the last couple years, there were a couple prototype transports embedding data within video games, namely rook - https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2808141 and castle - https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05904
I'm not aware of anything active on the image steganography front, but I think the question remains how the activity remains difficult to differentiate from legitimate activity.
--Will
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
Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!
Jodi
p.s.: Please advise if this is not the correct mailing list. and perhaps belongs in tor-assistants. If so, I will inquire there once my access is (hopefully!) granted.
-- www.jodispacek.com
_______________________________________________ tor-dev mailing list tor-dev@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev
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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
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 (:
On Wed, 24 Jan 2018 16:42:52 -0800 Jodi Spacek <jodi.spacek@gmail.com> 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
As far as I am aware (nb: haven't been keeping up with research in this area), no one has come up with a good solution to the issues mentioned in: Geddes, J., Schuchard, M., Hopper, N., "Cover Your ACKs: Pitfalls of Covert Channel Censorship Circumvention". https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~hoppernj/ccs13-cya.pdf Regards, -- Yawning Angel
participants (5)
-
Brandon Wiley -
David Fifield -
Jodi Spacek -
Will Scott -
Yawning Angel