[tor-dev] Pluggable transports research

[David Fifield]

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 the works for this or is it outdated?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