Pluggable Transports

For software projects with recurring bugs, efficiency or security issues there’s a joke making the rounds in the software industry: “Let’s re-write it in Rust!” It’s a fairly new low-level programming language with the declared goal to help developers avoid entire classes of bugs, security issues and other pitfalls. Re-writing software is very time consuming, so it rarely happens, especially when just one more fix will keep a project up and running. [Read More]

MASQUE is set of related IETF drafts for specifying flexible proxying built into a standard webserver. It is meant to be deployed on a server that is serving public websites, then this connection can be reused for proxying generic connections. It is very much a work in progress, so any of this can change. It is currently built on top of the QUIC+HTTP/3 and HTTP/2+TLS+TCP protocols. The website and proxy packets look the same, and all connections to the webserver will be shared and reused, regardless of whether its a web page request or proxy traffic. [Read More]

Pluggable Transports (PT) give software developers the means to establishing reliable connections in DPI-filtered network scenarios. A variety of techniques are supported, all available by implementing just one standard. We looked into how this can be put to work in Android Apps. Hence we crafted 3 fully functional PT-enabled prototype Apps based on well known open source projects. All our prototypes rely on obfs4 which is a stable PT implementation widely deployed by Tor. [Read More]