After the huge chemical explosion in Tianjin, China, this month, two clean-up efforts began. Amid the wreckage, first responders rescued people and doused fires. On the Web, China’s censors began deleting content suggesting the government could have done more to prevent or contain the disaster. Hundreds of websites and social-media accounts have now been shut down.
Improved censorship technology has made it harder for people in countries such as China, Iran, and Syria to bypass Internet controls and access uncensored information and services. Governments can now block anticensorship tools such as the Tor anonymity network or encrypted VPN connections.
But a new censorship evasion tool called Marionette may help reverse that trend.
Marionette helps Internet traffic that would normally be blocked masquerade as ordinary, permitted online behaviour. It can be configured to make your activity emulate just about any type of “innocent” activity, such as online gaming or Skype, by analysing samples of that kind of traffic.
Marionette can be programmed to respond in a way to maintain its cover if probed by a censorship computer system, a tactic China sometimes uses to investigate suspicious connections before blocking them.
“It sort of levels the playing field,” says Scott Coull, a security researcher with security firm RedJack, who helped develop Marionette. “If China is updating its censorship, you can adapt, too.”
Coull hopes that Marionette will one day be integrated into the anonymity network Tor or the censorship evasion tool Lantern — two systems backed by the US government and used by activists, government workers, and NGOs. He has already spoken to Tor developers about Marionette’s open-source code.
The system was introduced in a paper at the USENIX Security conference in Washington DC, this month, and developed by Coull with Kevin Dyer and Thomas Shrimpton of Portland State University. Phillipa Gill, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University, notes that going from a new idea to something that developers of tools such as Tor can offer to people takes time. “They need validation before you give it to people in countries where they could get arrested for using it,” she says.
www.technologyreview.com
