Extended Abstract: Shaperd: Easily Adoptable Real-Time Traffic Shaper for Fully Encrypted Protocols

TL;DR

Shaperd is a real-time traffic shaper that enhances the resilience of fully encrypted protocols against censorship detection with minimal performance overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel constraint system enabling real-time traffic shaping directly on packet contents for improved censorship resistance.

Findings

Shaperd adds minimal throughput overhead.

It allows generating traffic with customizable features.

Preliminary results show increased resilience to traffic analysis.

Abstract

Fully encrypted protocol-based tools (FEPs) are tools commonly used to circumvent censorship in restrictive regions, valued for their performance and security. However, in recent years, censors have been able to block them using an array of attacks based on passive traffic analysis and active probing. We propose Shaperd, an easily adoptable and real-time traffic shaper designed specifically to aid FEPs become more resilient to detection. Shaperd operates directly on packet contents in real time, using a novel constraint system to allow its users to generate traffic flows with any desired features. Our preliminary results reveal Shaperd introduces minimal overhead to the underlying system's throughput.