DATE: Thursday , April 25, 2002
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220
SPEAKER:
Nick Feamster
MIT
TITLE:
Infranet: Circumventing Web Censorship and Surveillance
Contributing: Nick Feamster, Magdalena Balazinska, Greg Harfst,
Hari Balakrishnan, David Karger
ABSTRACT:
An increasing number of countries and companies routinely block or monitor
access to parts of the Internet. To counteract these measures, we propose
Infranet, a system that enables clients to surreptitiously retrieve sensitive
content via cooperating Web servers distributed across the global Internet.
These Infranet servers
provide clients access to censored sites while continuing to host normal
uncensored content. Infranet uses a tunnel protocol that provides a covert
communication channel between its clients and servers, modulated over
standard HTTP transactions that resemble innocuous Web browsing. In the
upstream direction, Infranet clients send covert messages to Infranet
servers by associating additional semantics to the HTTP requests being
made. In the downstream direction, Infranet servers return content by
hiding censored data in uncensored images using steganographic techniques.
Our security analysis shows that Infranet can successfully circumvent
several sophisticated censoring techniques. We describe the design, a
prototype implementation, and measured performance of Infranet, highlighting
the tradeoffs between the level of security achieved and the performance
of Infranet browsing.
BIO:
Nick Feamster is a graduate student in the Networks and Mobile Systems
group at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT under the supervision
of Professor Hari Balakrishnan. His research focuses on
security, network video, and wide-area networking. Nick has interned at
HP Labs, Bell Labs, and AT&T Labs. He is an NSF Graduate Research
Fellow and the recipient of the Best Student Paper award at USENIX Security
2001.
SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/