TOR - Didactic pluggable transport

Ioana-Cristina Panait; Cristian Pop; Alexandru Sirbu; Adelina Vidovici; Emil Simion

Paper 2016/506

TOR - Didactic pluggable transport

Ioana-Cristina Panait, Cristian Pop, Alexandru Sirbu, Adelina Vidovici, and Emil Simion

Abstract

Considering that access to information is one of the most important aspects of modern society, the actions of certain governments or internet providers to control or, even worse, deny access for their citizens/users to selected data sources has lead to the implementation of new communication protocols. TOR is such a protocol, in which the path between the original source and destination is randomly generated using a network of globally connected routers and, by doing so, the client is not identified as actually accessing the resource. However, if the ISP knows that the first hop is part of TOR or if it can identify the contents of the exchanged packages as being TOR packages, by using advanced detection algorithms, it can still perform it’s denial policies. These types of detection are circumvented by the usage of bridges (TOR routers which aren’t publicly known) and pluggable transports (content changing protocols, in order to pass through as innocent-looking traffic). The development of a didactic pluggable transport in a simulated TOR network is the main purpose of this paper, in order to investigate the current state of the art of TOR development and analysis.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Implementation
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Minor revision. The post-proceedings of SECITC 2016 will be published by Springer: “Innovative Security Solutions for Information Technology and Communications”
Contact author(s): esimion @ fmi unibuc ro
History: 2016-05-25: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2016/506
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/506,
      author = {Ioana-Cristina Panait and Cristian Pop and Alexandru Sirbu and Adelina Vidovici and Emil Simion},
      title = {{TOR} - Didactic pluggable transport},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/506},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/506}
}