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Facade: High-Throughput, Deniable Censorship Circumvention Using Web Search
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You are not authorized to post comments.Ben Jones, Sam Burnett, Nick Feamster, Sean Donovan, Sarthak Grover, Sathya Gunasekaran, and Karim Habak, Georgia Institute of Technology
Censorship circumvention systems that use HTTP as cover traffic make tradeoffs between deniability and performance by offering either deniability at the expense of performance (e.g., Infranet) or performance at the expense of deniability (e.g., StegoTorus). These systems do so because HTTP is typically very asymmetric, with very little capacity to carry covert data in each HTTP GET request; higher throughput channels achieve performance by generating sequences of HTTP GET requests that do not mimic normal user traffic patterns. Fortunately, the emergence of new web services makes it increasingly common for any individual HTTP GET requests to contain more entropy. For example, site-specific search services create GET requests that contain sequences of search terms that can encode more bits than a single deniable HTTP request otherwise would. In this paper, we design a new encoding technique that uses web search terms to encode hidden messages in an upstream channel for censorship circumvention; implement the encoding technique in a system that resists fingerprinting attacks; and compare the security and performance of Facade to existing censorship circumvention systems that use HTTP as cover traffic.
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author = {Ben Jones and Sam Burnett and Nick Feamster and Sean Donovan and Sarthak Grover and Sathya Gunasekaran and Karim Habak},
title = {Facade: {High-Throughput}, Deniable Censorship Circumvention Using Web Search},
booktitle = {4th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 14)},
year = {2014},
address = {San Diego, CA},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci14/workshop-program/presentation/jones},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}
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