Looking at the Clouds: Leveraging Pub/Sub Cloud Services for Censorship-Resistant Rendezvous Channels
Authors: Afonso Vilalonga (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa & NOVA LINCS), João S. Resende (Universidade do Porto), Henrique Domingos (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa & NOVA LINCS)
Year: 2024
Issue: 2
Pages: 27–33
Abstract: Many censorship evasion systems rely on establishing a connection between the user and a proxy that acts as the gateway to censored content. However, informing the user about proxy addresses or exchanging the necessary information to establish a connection between the user and the proxy when the user resides in a censored region without access to non-blocked proxies is not a trivial task. In this paper, we address the problem of creating a censorship- resistant communication channel where information about how to establish these user-proxy connections (e.g., proxy IPs) can be effectively transmitted with a low risk of a censor blocking the communication channel, even if the censor has the same knowledge of how to operate them as the user. To this end, we designed and developed a prototype of a rendezvous protocol — a censorship- resistant communication channel for data transmission typically used for bootstrapping connections in censorship evasion systems — leveraging Pub/Sub cloud services, a popular and widely used service available across different cloud providers.
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