OSS: Using Online Scanning Services for Censorship Circumvention
Authors: D. Fifield, G. Nakibly, and D. Boneh
Abstract:
We introduce the concept of a web-based online scanning service, or
OSS for short, and show that these OSSes can be covertly used as
proxies in a censorship circumvention system.
Such proxies are suitable both for short one-time rendezvous messages
and bulk bidirectional data transport. We show that OSSes are
widely available on the Internet and blocking all of them can be
difficult and harmful. We measure the number of round trips and the
amount of data that can be pushed through various OSSes and show that
we can achieve throughputs of about 100KB/sec. To demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach we built a system for censored users to
communicate with blocked Tor relays using available OSS providers. We
report on its design and performance.
Reference:
In proceedings of PETS 2013,
LNCS 7981, pp. 185-204, 2013.
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Full paper: pdf