Extended Abstract: Shaperd: Easily Adoptable Real-Time Traffic Shaper for Fully Encrypted Protocols
Sarah Wilson, Stella Tian, Sina Kamali
TLDR
Shaperd is a real-time traffic shaper that enhances fully encrypted protocols' resilience against censorship detection with minimal overhead.
Key contributions
- Proposes Shaperd, a real-time traffic shaper for fully encrypted protocols (FEPs).
- Enhances FEPs' resilience against censorship detection via passive analysis and active probing.
- Uses a novel constraint system to generate traffic flows with desired features in real time.
- Introduces minimal overhead, maintaining underlying system throughput.
Why it matters
This paper addresses the critical issue of censorship detection against encrypted protocols. Shaperd offers a practical, low-overhead solution to help these tools remain effective, ensuring continued access to information in restrictive regions.
Original Abstract
Fully encrypted protocol-based tools (FEPs) are tools commonly used to circumvent censorship in restrictive regions, valued for their performance and security. However, in recent years, censors have been able to block them using an array of attacks based on passive traffic analysis and active probing. We propose Shaperd, an easily adoptable and real-time traffic shaper designed specifically to aid FEPs become more resilient to detection. Shaperd operates directly on packet contents in real time, using a novel constraint system to allow its users to generate traffic flows with any desired features. Our preliminary results reveal Shaperd introduces minimal overhead to the underlying system's throughput.
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