Detecting Probe-resistant Proxies

Abstract

Censorship circumvention proxies have to resist active probing attempts, where censors connect to suspected servers and attempt to communicate using known proxy protocols. If the server responds in a way that reveals it is a proxy, the censor can block it with minimal collateral risk to other non-proxy services. Censors such as the Great Firewall of China have previously been observed using basic forms of this technique to find and block proxy servers as soon as they are used. In response, circumventors have created new “probe-resistant” proxy protocols, including obfs4, shadowsocks, and Lampshade, that attempt to prevent censors from discovering them. These proxies require knowledge of a secret in order to use, and the servers remain silent when probed by a censor that doesn't have the secret in an attempt to make it more difficult for censors to detect them. In this paper, we identify ways that censors can still distinguish such probe-resistant proxies from other innocuous hosts on the Internet, despite their design. We discover unique TCP behaviors of five probe-resistant protocols used in popular circumvention software that could allow censors to effectively confirm suspected proxies with minimal false positives. We evaluate and analyze our attacks on hundreds of thousands of servers collected from a 10 Gbps university ISP vantage point over several days as well as active scanning using ZMap. We find that our attacks are able to efficiently identify proxy servers with only a handful of probing connections, with negligible false positives. Using our datasets, we also suggest defenses to these attacks that make it harder for censors to distinguish proxies from other common servers, and we work with proxy developers to implement these changes in several popular circumvention tools.