Extended Abstract: Traffic Splitting for Pluggable Transports
Authors: Anna Harbluk Lorimer (University of Chicago), Rob Jansen (U.S. Naval Research Laboratory), Nick Feamster (University of Chicago)
Year: 2024
Issue: 1
Pages: 29–31
Abstract: As censors continue to develop more advanced technologies to police access to the Internet, new techniques are also needed to promote Internet freedom. Traffic splitting is one technique that has been shown to defend against various privacy attacks and to improve network performance, but it has not been evaluated in the context of censorship-resistant systems. In this extended abstract we outline a design for traffic splitting for pluggable transports that uses what we call a "shim" pluggable transport and modified Tor Bridges as proxies. We describe our hypotheses and how we plan to evaluate our implementation to determine the extent to which pluggable transports that employ traffic splitting can improve performance, protect against website fingerprinting attacks, and improve resistance to detection and blocking by a censor.
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