[tor-dev] Pluggable transports research

[Brandon Wiley]

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 at 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
>
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