Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Greg Harfst, Hari Balakrishnan, David Karger
11th USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, August 2002
Best Student Paper Award
An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or
monitor access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these
measures, we propose Infranet, a system that enables clients to
surreptitiously retrieve sensitive content via cooperating Web servers
distributed across the global Internet. These Infranet servers
provide clients access to censored sites while continuing to host
normal uncensored content. Infranet uses a tunnel protocol that
provides a covert communication channel between its clients and
servers, modulated over standard HTTP transactions that resemble
innocuous Web browsing. In the upstream direction, Infranet clients
send covert messages to Infranet servers by associating meaning to the
sequence of HTTP requests being made. In the downstream
direction, Infranet servers return content by hiding censored data in
uncensored images using steganographic techniques. We describe the
design, a prototype implementation, security properties, and
performance of Infranet. Our security analysis shows that Infranet
can successfully circumvent several sophisticated censoring
techniques.
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Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{feamster2002infranet, author = "Nick Feamster and Magdalena Balazinska and Greg Harfst and Hari Balakrishnan and David Karger", title = "{Infranet: Circumventing Web Censorship and Surveillance}", booktitle = {11th USENIX Security Symposium}, year = {2002}, month = {August}, address = {San Francisco, CA} }