Analyzing the Great Firewall of China over space and time

Abstract: A nation-scale firewall, colloquially referred to as the "Great Firewall of China," implements many different types of censorship and content filtering to control China's Internet traffic. Past work has shown that the firewall occasionally fails. In other words, sometimes clients in China are able to reach blacklisted servers outside of China. This phenomenon has not yet been characterized because it is infeasible to find a large and geographically diverse set of clients in China from which to test connectivity. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by using a hybrid idle scan technique that is able to measure connectivity between a remote client and an arbitrary server, neither of which are under the control of the researcher performing measurements. In addition to hybrid idle scans, we present and employ a novel side channel in the Linux kernel's SYN backlog. We show that both techniques are practical by measuring the reachability of the Tor network which is known to be blocked in China. Our measurements reveal that failures in the firewall occur throughout the entire country without any conspicuous geographical patterns. We give some evidence that routing plays a role, but other factors (such as how the GFW maintains its list of IP/port pairs to block) may also be important

OpenVPN is Open to VPN Fingerprinting

VPN adoption has seen steady growth over the past decade due to increased public awareness of privacy and surveillance threats. In response, certain governments are attempting to restrict VPN access by identifying connections using "dual use" DPI technology. To investigate the potential for VPN blocking, we develop mechanisms for accurately fingerprinting connections using OpenVPN, the most popular protocol for commercial VPN services. We identify three fingerprints based on protocol features such as byte pattern, packet size, and server response. Playing the role of an attacker who controls the network, we design a two-phase framework that performs passive fingerprinting and active probing in sequence. We evaluate our framework in partnership with a million-user ISP and find that we identify over 85% of OpenVPN flows with only negligible false positives, suggesting that OpenVPN-based services can be effectively blocked with little collateral damage. Although some commercial VPNs implement countermeasures to avoid detection, our framework successfully identified connections to 34 out of 41 "obfuscated" VPN configurations. We discuss the implications of the VPN fingerprintability for different threat models and propose short-term defenses. In the longer term, we urge commercial VPN providers to be more transparent about their obfuscation approaches and to adopt more principled detection countermeasures, such as those developed in censorship circumvention research.Comment: In: USENIX Security Symposium 2022 (USENIX Security '22

Assessing the Privacy Benefits of Domain Name Encryption

As Internet users have become more savvy about the potential for their Internet communication to be observed, the use of network traffic encryption technologies (e.g., HTTPS/TLS) is on the rise. However, even when encryption is enabled, users leak information about the domains they visit via DNS queries and via the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension of TLS. Two recent proposals to ameliorate this issue are DNS over HTTPS/TLS (DoH/DoT) and Encrypted SNI (ESNI). In this paper we aim to assess the privacy benefits of these proposals by considering the relationship between hostnames and IP addresses, the latter of which are still exposed. We perform DNS queries from nine vantage points around the globe to characterize this relationship. We quantify the privacy gain offered by ESNI for different hosting and CDN providers using two different metrics, the k-anonymity degree due to co-hosting and the dynamics of IP address changes. We find that 20% of the domains studied will not gain any privacy benefit since they have a one-to-one mapping between their hostname and IP address. On the other hand, 30% will gain a significant privacy benefit with a k value greater than 100, since these domains are co-hosted with more than 100 other domains. Domains whose visitors' privacy will meaningfully improve are far less popular, while for popular domains the benefit is not significant. Analyzing the dynamics of IP addresses of long-lived domains, we find that only 7.7% of them change their hosting IP addresses on a daily basis. We conclude by discussing potential approaches for website owners and hosting/CDN providers for maximizing the privacy benefits of ESNI.Comment: In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIA CCS '20), October 5-9, 2020, Taipei, Taiwa