IP over Voice-over-IP for censorship circumvention (1207.2683v2)

Abstract: Open communication over the Internet poses a serious threat to countries with repressive regimes, leading them to develop and deploy network-based censorship mechanisms within their networks. Existing censorship circumvention systems face different difficulties in providing unobservable communication with their clients; this limits their availability and poses threats to their users. To provide the required unobservability, several recent circumvention systems suggest modifying Internet routers running outside the censored region to intercept and redirect packets to censored destinations. However, these approaches require modifications to ISP networks, and hence requires cooperation from ISP operators and/or network equipment vendors, presenting a substantial deployment challenge. In this report we propose a deployable and unobservable censorship-resistant infrastructure, called FreeWave. FreeWave works by modulating a client's Internet connections into acoustic signals that are carried over VoIP connections. Such VoIP connections are targeted to a server, FreeWave server, that extracts the tunneled traffic of clients and proxies them to the uncensored Internet. The use of actual VoIP connections, as opposed to traffic morphing, allows FreeWave to relay its VoIP connections through oblivious VoIP nodes, hence keeping itself unblockable from censors that perform IP address blocking. Also, the use of end-to-end encryption prevents censors from identifying FreeWave's VoIP connections using packet content filtering technologies, like deep-packet inspection. We prototype the designed FreeWave system over the popular VoIP system of Skype. We show that FreeWave is able to reliably achieve communication bandwidths that are sufficient for web browsing, even when clients are far distanced from the FreeWave server.