AutoFlowLeaker: Circumventing web censorship through automation services

Abstract

© 2017 IEEE. By hiding messages inside existing network protocols, anti-censorship tools could empower censored users to visit blocked websites. However, existing solutions generally suffer from two limitations. First, they usually need the support of ISP or the deployment of many customized hosts to conceal the communication between censored users and blocked websites. Second, their manipulations of normal network traffic may result in detectable features, which could be captured by the censorship system. In this paper, to tackle these limitations, we propose a novel framework that exploits the publicly available automation services and the plenty of web services and contents to circumvent web censorship, and realize it in a practical tool named AutoFlowLeaker. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate AutoFlowLeaker, and the results show that it has promising performance and can effectively evade realworld web censorship.