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Tor Tests Undetectably Encrypted Connections In Iran
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Ahead of the anniversary of Iran's revolution, the country's government has locked down its already-censored Internet, blocking access to many services and in some cases cutting off all encrypted traffic on the Web of the kind used by secure email, social networking and banking sites. In response, the information-freedom-focused Tor Project is testing a new tool it's calling 'obfsproxy,' or obfuscated proxy, which aims to make SSL or TLS traffic appear to be unencrypted traffic like HTTP or instant messaging data. While the tool currently only disguises SSL as the SOCKS protocol, in future versions it will aim to disguise encrypted traffic as any protocol the user chooses. Tor executive director Andrew Lewman says the idea is to 'make your Ferrari look like a Toyota by putting an actual Toyota shell over the Ferrari.'" Reader bonch adds: "A thread on Hacker News provides first-hand accounts as well as workarounds."
The MPAA has already called in the FBI, CIA, NSA, and a cadre of hired Senators to put a stop to this illegal piracy-facilitating tool--which, if it's not stopped, will cost millions of American jobs and perhaps collapse the entire economy. Our children's futures are at stake here, people!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
While this is a great effort, and I really congratulate the Tor proyect for all that they've done and continue to do, this still is nowhere close to the solution on the real issue here: governments that over and over again limit people's freedom of speech and privacy.
How do you hide something unreadable within something readable? ... damn, you're going to make me RTFA, aren't you? :P
The more you tighten your grip, $dictator, the more $locations will slip through your fingers. - $rebel_princess.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
...then how do they get tested deterministically? They MUST be undetectable, because the summary headlines are never ever wrong, nor do they exaggerate.
It'd be slow, for sure, but encapsulating messages inside of images using steganography libraries should be very feasible as a means of tunneling.
-niteq
"Undetectably encrypted". No. There really is no such thing. "Obfuscated", "disguised", ok I'll take those, but not "undetectably". Makes it sound like it's flat out impossible to figure out the traffic contains encrypted data.
I'm sure cisco and motorola etc will send their people over there this weekend to make upgrades to the censorware they sold them last year. They provide such good customer service to our adversaries when there's a buck to be made. (isn't there a law against this? they push so hard politically in one direction all the while the american businesses drive a dagger in the back of their goals)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
in the technological arms race, this is pretty damn cool idea.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Edgar Allen would be so proud.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Wow! Why are they even talking about this?? Do they want the enemy to discover their method before this new weapon has even been fired in anger? Folks at Tor need to take and pass the OPSEC 100 course again.
No need to make the name of the protocol itself an obfuscation. How the hell am I supposed to pronounce the consonant group "bfspr"?
This arms race of censorship and counter measures will have one definitive outcome: the best and the brightest of Iranian youth will find a way to emigrate because they don't want to live in an isolated theocracy. The resulting brain drain will set them back a century. This is what happens to governments driven by fear. Those in power in Iran fear their own people the most.
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." -- Thomas Pynchon
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
How do you hide something unreadable within something readable? ... damn, you're going to make me RTFA, aren't you? :P
As I read the blurb (I have no inside knowledge) they're not making the PAYLOAD look unencrypted. They're circumventing the type-of-flow identification mechanisms built into router filtering by encapsulating the encrypted data within an outer layer (and addressed to the port of) another protocol. (They may even have put a layer on top of the existing service so that, unless it identifies the flow as an encapsulated TOR flow, it actually PERFORMS the service.)
The result would be that, if they intercept the flow and try to parse it as what it purports to be, it may not make sense. But if their router look at the parts of the packets that are characteristic of what the flow purports to be, it will identify it as normal traffic and let it through. And if the router tries doing something like a keyword search through the bodies of the packets it won't get hits because the bodies are encrypted.
You can use this approach with any protocol that can handle the traffic patters of a TOR connection (possibly with added padding packets to make the characteristics look more like the purported flow).
Downsides might be:
1) If you do a masked TOR only server on the port they might try to connect to the purported flow and detect that this server is not what it seems.
2) If you do a diverting pancake you need a way to flag for the pancake that this is the masked TOR flow. If that's well known they might write a filter for it. (Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman have developed a steganographic method for applying such a tag. It is embedded in their own "TELEX" network-based firewall bypasser but might be adapted to this purpose. paper a href="https://telex.cc/"code")
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
(Look at the previous news on Slashdot about Tor and China.)
So Iran is moving towards a DarkNet called Tor. I wonder if ACTA, SOPA, or PIPA would cause a similar reaction in the countries they're enforced upon.
Use it to leak secrets embarassing to US politicians.
"If we can't parse it, it gets blocked."
In the old days, Cuban international phone calls were monitored. At least one person started talking a language other than English or Spanish and the operator broke in and told them to speak English or Spanish or get cut off.
Source: Something I read in a reputable newspaper or magazine back in the 1970s or 1980s.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"I've often wondered why nobody ever nicks the body and VIN of an economy car to reduce theft risk and insurance costs of a sports car"
Because they hot rod the economy car to get a sufficiently similar performance result.
That's been done for almost one hundred years, and "Gow jobs" (for example) were being built before (possibly all) Slashdot posters were born.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Because Tor wasn't slow enough already...
IP steganography makes it all the cooler, while still keeping a sort of logic about it that is very high level.
I hope you all understand this will change things forever...
We're waiting for the day Iran drops a nuke on Israel, so the world will be a safer place.
-1? Because of a joke? Or is the joke not funny at all?
This topic is important to more than just Iranians. The events of the Arab Spring and developments across Europe, Asia, and America indicate we average folks are going to need a truly free means of communicating soon if not now. It has to be impossible for governments or corporations to blackout communications anywhere, so that their misdeeds cannot go unwitnessed.
I know that separate projects exist to tackle this problem in different ways. B.A.T.M.A.N.'s ad hoc network protocol is one. Point-to-point information transfer via laser is another. Balloon-born "satellites" is another. I also read recently that the Zetas gang in Mexico had built their own separate cellular network.
How can we hoi poloi implement these redundant networks at low- to no-cost, with maximum ease of use so that censorship will become impossible?
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
easy enough to get around that.
Take a particular legitimate activity, like say, reading the Koran (Qu'ran?) online, in .jpg form.
Now steganographically obfuscate all your pr0n inside the jpg's you're viewing. Images of the Koran could have ANYTHING steganographically obfuscated inside of them. Embed an entire proxy GET inside the image and send it to a "proxy" server which strips off all the cruft makes the get request, and sends it all back in the next page of the next chapter & verse.
In fact, any image, anywhere, on any web page, including "advertisements" could be modified in this way. In fact, the only thing you need to implement such a system is a transport mechanism larger than the message.
Suddenly, everyone is doing the right thing.
Or, put another way, everyone is using a potentially right thing to do a wrong thing while appearing to do a right thing.
In other words, this race is lost. This horse is out of the barn, across the field, down the road, and in another county. The methods available CANNOT be blocked by any human operated or automated means. It's done. The government of Iran simply doesn't know it yet.
$ perl -e 'print "\x48\x65\x6c\x70\n"'
Help
$
"make your Ferrari look like a Toyota by putting an actual Toyota shell over the Ferrari"
Ya, and it'll perform like a yugo.
No matter the speed of my connection, TOR is always slow.
Thumbs up on the tech, just comparing TOR to Ferrari is a bit of a stretch.
i'm not interested in politics but i hate the already situation in iran. apart from the inflation and the difficulties we are undergoing at the moment, which i don't know how much longer it's gonna last, i've been having trouble reading my email since the 12th of Bahman and it's been a few days which i haven't been able to check my email at all. the question is this, if the government is righteous why are they terrorizing us? why are they so afraid of getting iranians to know more about the global issues. why are they hacking us, controlling us, murdering us, sabotaging us?
Love it.
http://bayimg.com/naMNpAaDI
The methods available CANNOT be blocked by any human operated or automated means.
Sure they can. North Korea does a pretty good job of it.
You just have to block ALL cross-border communications except by a very few trusted, authorized individuals. You still have the weak point of one of those individuals deliberately or accidentally leaking unwanted information, but in practical terms, you CAN keep unwanted information from reaching your citizens.
The price you pay - one that North Korea is very willing to pay - is that practically ALL outside information is kept from crossing the border, even a lot of information that would benefit you, the government, if it did cross.
This technique works on a local level as well:
Cults isolate their non-elite members. Domestic abusers isolate their victims.
This "information control" technique is even used in a healthy way:
Families isolate children from information the kids are not mentally prepared to handle and/or funnel the information through parents and other trusted entities.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.