Differential Degradation Vulnerabilities in Censorship Circumvention Systems

Abstract: Several recently proposed censorship circumvention systems use encrypted network channels of popular applications to hide their communications. For example, a Tor pluggable transport called Snowflake uses the WebRTC data channel, while a system called Protozoa substitutes content in a WebRTC video-call application. By using the same channel as the cover application and (in the case of Protozoa) matching its observable traffic characteristics, these systems aim to resist powerful network-based censors capable of large-scale traffic analysis. Protozoa, in particular, achieves a strong indistinguishability property known as behavioral independence. We demonstrate that this class of systems is generically vulnerable to a new type of active attacks we call "differential degradation." These attacks do not require multi-flow measurements or traffic classification and are thus available to all real-world censors. They exploit the discrepancies between the respective network requirements of the circumvention system and its cover application. We show how a censor can use the minimal application-level information exposed by WebRTC to create network conditions that cause the circumvention system to suffer a much bigger degradation in performance than the cover application. Even when the attack causes no observable differences in network traffic and behavioral independence still holds, the censor can block circumvention at a low cost, without resorting to traffic analysis, and with minimal collateral damage to non-circumvention users. We present effective differential degradation attacks against Snowflake and Protozoa. We explain the root cause of these vulnerabilities, analyze the tradeoffs faced by the designers of circumvention systems, and propose a modified version of Protozoa that resists differential degradation attacks.