International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 02 June 2013

Daniel J. Bernstein, Anna Krasnova, Tanja Lange
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Censorship-circumvention tools are in an arms race against censors. The censors study all traffic passing into and out of their controlled sphere, and try to disable censorship-circumvention tools without completely shutting down the Internet. Tools aim to shape their traffic patterns to match unblocked programs, so that simple traffic profiling cannot identify the tools within a reasonable number of traces; the censors respond by deploying firewalls with increasingly sophisticated deep-packet inspection.

Cryptography hides patterns in user data but does not evade censorship if the censor can recognize patterns in the cryptography itself. In particular, elliptic-curve cryptography often transmits points on known elliptic curves, and those points are easily distinguishable from uniform random strings of bits.

This paper introduces high-security high-speed elliptic-curve systems in which elliptic-curve points are encoded so as to be indistinguishable from uniform random strings.

Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.