Abstract
Anonymity systems such as Tor are being blocked by many countries, as they are increasingly being used to circumvent censorship systems. As a response, several pluggable transport (proxy) systems have been developed that obfuscate the first hop of the Tor circuit (i.e., the connection between the Tor client and the bridge node). In this paper, we tackle a common challenge faced by all web-based pluggable transports – the need to perfectly emulate the complexities of a web-browser and web-server. To that end, we propose a new system called the JumpBox that readily integrates with existing pluggable transports and avoids emulation by forwarding the HTTP/HTTPS requests through a real browser and webserver. We evaluate our system using multiple pluggable transports and demonstrate that it imposes minimal additional overhead.
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Notes
- 1.
While Chrome provides limited certificate-pinning ability for selected Google properties, it is insufficient for our needs as it does not extend to all sites and also does not have the innocuous request generation capability described below.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Drew Dean, Roger Dingledine, Mike Lynn, Dodge Mumford, Paul Vixie and Michael Walker for various discussions that led to the design and improvement of the JumpBox system. This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific under Contract No. N66001-11-C-4022. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency or Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific. Distribution Statement A: Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited.
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Massar, J., Mason, I., Briesemeister, L., Yegneswaran, V. (2015). JumpBox – A Seamless Browser Proxy for Tor Pluggable Transports. In: Tian, J., Jing, J., Srivatsa, M. (eds) International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 152. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23829-6_44
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