Systemization of Pluggable Transports for Censorship Resistance

An increasing number of countries implement Internet censorship at different scales and for a variety of reasons. In particular, the link between the censored client and entry point to the uncensored network is a frequent target of censorship due to the ease with which a nation-state censor can control it. A number of censorship resistance systems have been developed thus far to help circumvent blocking on this link, which we refer to as link circumvention systems (LCs). The variety and profusion of attack vectors available to a censor has led to an arms race, leading to a dramatic speed of evolution of LCs. Despite their inherent complexity and the breadth of work in this area, there is no systematic way to evaluate link circumvention systems and compare them against each other. In this paper, we (i) sketch an attack model to comprehensively explore a censor’s capabilities, (ii) present an abstract model of a LC, a system that helps a censored client communicate with a server over the Internet while resisting censorship, (iii) describe an evaluation stack that underscores a layered approach to evaluate LCs, and (iv) systemize and evaluate existing censorship resistance systems that provide link circumvention. We highlight open challenges in the evaluation and development of LCs and discuss possible mitigations. Content from this paper was published in Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS), Volume 2016, Issue 4 (July 2016) as "SoK: Making Sense of Censorship Resistance Systems" by Sheharbano Khattak, Tariq Elahi, Laurent Simon, Colleen M. Swanson, Steven J. Murdoch and Ian Goldberg. DOI: 10.1515/popets-2016-0028