Bytes to Schlep? Use a FEP: Hiding Protocol Metadata with Fully Encrypted Protocols

Abstract: Fully Encrypted Protocols (FEPs) have arisen in practice as a technique to avoid network censorship. Such protocols are designed to produce messages that appear completely random. This design hides communications metadata, such as version and length fields, and makes it difficult to even determine what protocol is being used. Moreover, these protocols frequently support padding to hide the length of protocol fields and the contained message. These techniques have relevance well beyond censorship circumvention, as protecting protocol metadata has security and privacy benefits for all Internet communications. The security of FEP designs depends on cryptographic assumptions, but neither security definitions nor proofs exist for them. We provide novel security definitions that capture the metadata-protection goals of FEPs. Our definitions are given in both the datastream and datagram settings, which model the ubiquitous TCP and UDP interfaces available to protocol designers. We prove relations among these new notions and existing security definitions. We further present new FEP constructions and prove their security. Finally, we survey existing FEP candidates and characterize the extent to which they satisfy FEP security. We identify novel ways in which these protocols are identifiable, including their responses to the introduction of data errors and the sizes of their smallest protocol messages.