Mailet: Instant Social Networking under Censorship
Authors: Shuai Li (University of Minnesota), Nicholas Hopper (University of Minnesota)
Volume: 2016
Issue: 2
Pages: 175–192
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2016-0011
Abstract: Social media websites are blocked in many regimes where Internet censorship is applied. In this paper, we introduce Mailet, an unobservable transport proxy which enables the users to access social websites by email applications. Without assuming the Mailet servers are trustworthy, Mailet can support the services requiring privileges without having the complete credential. Particularly, the credential is split and distributed in two Mailet servers, and neither of them can recover the credential alone. To recover the credential in a TLS record message, we propose a highly efficient Galois/Counter Mode(GCM) based secure computation, which can enable the two servers to conceal their separate credential copies in the computation. We implemented a prototype for Twitter.com to demonstrate the usability and security of Mailet.
Keywords: censorship resistance, secure computation
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