Easily integrated traffic obfuscator

From ApocryphWiki

Wednesday, December 29, 2004 2:05 PM

Now that freenet-like systems are finally developing real-time connection-oriented functionality, it's important that regulation and corporate IT tyranny not interfere. Need a toolkit for making socket connections over an obfuscated link, using HTTP, SMTP, FTP, whatever as cover traffic.

It occurs to me that one could use hash collisions ala hashcash to embed an encryption key into the obfuscated traffic; by computing the first hash collision with the data or some subset thereof and an incrementing counter, the resultant hash code is the encryption key. This means that the end-point has to spend a few seconds of compute time, but intermediary routers will not be able to afford the cost of checking all traffic for obfuscation.

Iirc, the computational complexity problem also had implementations in which the server challenged the client, which might be a good way to put the computational load on the client instead of the server. The original RFC for hashash referenced the relevant papers.

The most significant problem would be the performance degradation associated with the cover traffic. Downloads could be hidden in images and other plausibly large downloads, but what of uploads, eg a P2P network?

This, coupled with a flexible nat traversal library, could liberate anonimization technology and create a network environment inpenetrable to regulators and tyrannical governments.