Call for Master's Students 2020/21
MSc Proposal 2020-21 / CA1
Title
Routing Infrastructure for Censorship-Resistant Overlay Networks
Advisor
Nuno Santos
Objectives
Many states all over the world implement censorship mechanisms that prevent free access to information through the outright impairment or blockage of Internet communications. In our research team, we have built a tool, named Protozoa, which allows Internet users located in censored regions to piggyback on WebRTC-enabled streaming applications, such as Whereby.com, in order to establish covert tunnels that can circumvent said mechanisms. A user only needs to make a video call with a friend located in the free Internet region. That friend runs a proxy service that will allow all Internet traffic generated by Alice to securely and secretly cross the boundaries of the censored region and reach blocked services such as Youtube or Twitter. Based on this point-to-point hidden communication capability, our next step is to build CRON, a Censorship-Resistant Overlay Network that will allow those users that do not have direct contacts with trusted peers to access the free Internet region in a mediated fashion, i.e., by leveraging a friend of a friend as a proxy.
Specifically, the goal of this thesis is to design and implement the routing infrastructure that will be necessary to sustain the communications between clients and proxies by stitching up several Protozoa channels along the way. The resulting multi-hop channel will constitute a covert circuit. This thesis will be concerned about addressing all the necessary issues involving the establishment and maintenance of covert circuits, namely: i) architecting an addressing scheme for identifying the nodes in the overlay network, ii) discovering available proxies in the free region, iii) identifying and managing routes between clients and proxies, iv) fashioning covert circuits based on multiple single-hop Protozoa channels, and v) handling churn, faults, and load balancing issues. This system will be built on top of the Protozoa prototype currently available in our team. We expect this work to make original scientific contributions. The resulting system will be released as an open source project. If you like building distributed systems, this is the right topic for you.
Requirements (e.g., grades, concluded courses)
Interest in security and distributed systems. Proficiency in C/C++ programming. Willingness to learn the Rust programming language. (CRON will most probably be implemented in Rust.)
Location
IST-Alameda (INESC-ID) or IST-Tagus
Observations
For more information about this project, please visit: https://www.gsd.inesc-id.pt/~nsantos/msc-topics/msc-topics-CA.html. This work will be performed in collaboration with Diogo Barradas, a PhD student with expertise in traffic analysis, censorship resistance systems, and machine learning.