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CensorSpoofer: asymmetric communication using IP spoofing for censorship-resistant web browsing

Published: 16 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

A key challenge in censorship-resistant web browsing is being able to direct legitimate users to redirection proxies while preventing censors, posing as insiders, from discovering their addresses and blocking them. We propose a new framework for censorship-resistant web browsing called CensorSpoofer that addresses this challenge by exploiting the asymmetric nature of web browsing traffic and making use of IP spoofing. CensorSpoofer de-couples the upstream and downstream channels, using a low-bandwidth indirect channel for delivering outbound requests (URLs) and a high-bandwidth direct channel for downloading web content. The upstream channel hides the request contents using steganographic encoding within Email or instant messages, whereas the downstream channel uses IP address spoofing so that the real address of the proxies is not revealed either to legitimate users or censors. We built a proof-of-concept prototype that uses encrypted VoIP for this downstream channel and demonstrated the feasibility of using the CensorSpoofer framework in a realistic environment.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
    October 2012
    1088 pages
    ISBN:9781450316514
    DOI:10.1145/2382196
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 16 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. asymmetric communication
    2. censorship resistance
    3. ip spoofing
    4. voice-over-ip

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    October 16 - 18, 2012
    North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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