University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting on Google Chrome

Ping, Jinren

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/91559

Description

Title
Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting on Google Chrome
Author(s)
Ping, Jinren
Contributor(s)
Borisov, Nikita
Issue Date
2016-05
Keyword(s)
  • domain fronting
  • censorship
Abstract
Domain-fronting is a technique used to circumvent internet censorship by hiding the remote endpoint of a communication. This technique encapsulates communications with a forbidden domain within HTTPS communications with an allowed domain. The payload is hidden inside the body of a HTTPS communication. Thus the communication with forbidden Domain-A appears to be a communication with allowed Domain-B. This technique is blocking-resistant because the allowed domain cannot be blocked without causing great collateral damage. Domain fronting has been implemented on platforms such as Tor. One inconvenience brought up by this implementation is the significant amount of delay introduced by the complicated infrastructure of Tor. The goal of this research is to implement domain fronting in a more practical way and to reduce the delay. Google Chrome is used as platform in this research to implement domain fronting. The functionality of Chrome can be modified and enhanced through extensions and Apps. In my approach, a Chrome App is running with Chrome to domain-front all communications that are blocked by the censor. These communications are domain-fronted to an Azure CDN server, which is connected to a remote proxy server. The remote proxy server will parse the payload request the retrieve the response. This approach reduces the delay because of the simpler structure compared to Tor. The advantage of this approach over Tor is the better performance while the disadvantage is the loss of anonymity provided by Tor.
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/91559

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