[liberationtech] Anticensorship in the Internet's Infrastructure

[Jacob Appelbaum]

On 07/18/2011 05:34 PM, Frank Corrigan wrote:
> Telex seems an interesting system, though I am puzzled whether the
> insertion of a 'secret'  "cryptographic tag into the headers" could be
> detected, as the FAQ says it "looks" random, rather than is..
> 
> "To create a Telex connection, the client replaces this number with what
> we call a tag — essentially, an encrypted value that looks random until
> it's decrypted."
> https://telex.cc/qa.html
> 
> Though as it is a proof-of-concept, could it go the same way as the
> 'vanish' concept, which I did manage to work with, but them development
> ceased. Vanish <http://vanish.cs.washington.edu/>

My understanding of the system is that they chose an area of the TLS
handshake that is normally random - that is important and very smart. If
they make that random data meaningful but still random, it's really
going to be quite hard to detect if it's constantly changing.

I'm hopeful about Telex and I think Alex's team is on the right path for
some new directions in the censorship resistance area.

All the best,
Jacob