Geneva: Evolving Censorship Evasion Strategies (CCS 19) about bbs HOT 3 OPEN

Hi all - I wanted to share an update in response to another question that was asked earlier:

Could the technique be applied to server-side evasion?

The answer is yes, and we've written a second paper on extending Geneva to the server-side, the challenges of server-side packet manipulation evasion, and the strategies Geneva was able to find. Our paper was recently accepted to SIGCOMM, and is available here: https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/papers/come-as-you-are.pdf . We focused specifically on ‘vanilla’/non-evasion protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SMTP, and DNS), but in theory Geneva could be applied to identify strategies to reach/protect bridges as well. Outside the scope of that paper, we’ve done a little exploration of protecting Shadowsocks in the past with success. All of the server-side code is included in the code release mentioned by @wkrp above.

from bbs.

Geneva was the topic of the 2020-06-25 Tor anti-censorship reading group.

• Geneva could be interesting as a client-side method of reaching blocked Tor bridges. To do that, however, it would have to run on a variety of operating systems, including mobile operating systems, which could be difficult because of the low-level packet manipulations it needs to do.
  • The example of GoodbyeDPI, which has users, shows that the deployment of a system based on packet manipulation can be successful, however.
• Why is the source code for the genetic algorithm not yet available?
• Could the technique be applied to server-side evasion? It would be great to have something that a bridge operator could run, not requiring as much portability. (The Internet Measurement Village talk on Geneva discusses server-side evasion.)

from bbs.

• Why is the source code for the genetic algorithm not yet available?

@Kkevsterrr informs me that the genetic algorithm component is now available:

• Kkevsterrr/geneva#15
• https://geneva.readthedocs.io/ explains how to use it

from bbs.