🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the vulnerability of fully encrypted protocols (FEPs) to passive traffic analysis and active probing attacks, which undermines their ability to evade censorship. To mitigate this, the paper proposes Shaperd—the first lightweight, real-time traffic shaper designed specifically for FEPs. Shaperd operates at the packet level with minimal overhead and introduces a constraint-based system that enables users to generate customizable traffic patterns matching arbitrary target profiles. By doing so, it significantly enhances resistance to detection while maintaining high deployability and low observability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that Shaperd achieves strong anti-detection capabilities with only negligible throughput overhead, offering a practical solution for privacy-preserving communication under adversarial network surveillance.
📝 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.