[tor-dev] Pluggable transports research

[Jodi Spacek]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 5:32 PM, David Fifield <david at 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 the works for this or is it outdated?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 (:
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