TapDance: End-to-Middle Anticensorship without Flow Blocking Eric Wustrow, Colleen M. Swanson, and J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14/technical-sessions/presentation/wustrow This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium. August 20–22, 2014 • San Diego, CA ISBN 978-1-931971-15-7 Open access to the Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX TapDance: End-to-Middle Anticensorship without Flow Blocking Eric Wustrow Colleen M. Swanson J. Alex Halderman University of Michigan University of Michigan University of Michigan
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract tools, researchers have recently introduced a new ap- In response to increasingly sophisticated state-sponsored proach called end-to-middle (E2M) proxying [21, 26,49]. Internet censorship, recent work has proposed a new ap- In an E2M system, friendly network operators agree to proach to censorship resistance: end-to-middle proxying. help users in other, censored countries access blocked This concept, developed in systems such as Telex, Decoy information. These censored users direct traffic toward Routing, and Cirripede, moves anticensorship technology uncensored “decoy” sites, but include with such traffic a into the core of the network, at large ISPs outside the special signal (undetectable by censors) through which censoring country. In this paper, we focus on two techni- they request access to different, censored destinations. cal obstacles to the deployment of certain end-to-middle Participating friendly networks, upon detecting this signal, schemes: the need to selectively block flows and the need redirect the user’s traffic to the censored destination.