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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.
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
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.
"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...
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.
$ perl -e 'print "\x48\x65\x6c\x70\n"'
Help
$
It'd take more than one nuke to destroy Israel, and they have nukes of their own. Whoever attacked Israel with nukes would receive far more than they sent. The current government of Iran isn't that stupid - but maybe a future one will be. Or they just might be sensible enough to do so covertly: Send the nuke in a shipping container, no way to tell exactly who did it.
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.