Greetings! My name is Tim Wilde, Software Engineer at Team Cymru, Inc., and a big fan of the Tor Project and everything that they do. We've helped out the Tor Project with a few investigations into probing/blocking of Tor by oppressive regimes, and the guys asked me to write this one up for the Tor Blog, so here I am! Note: any opinions expressed here are mine, nor those of Team Cymru or the Tor Project.

In October 2011, ticket #4185 was filed in the Tor bug tracker by a user in China who found that their connections to US-based Tor bridge relays were being regularly cut off after a very short period of time. At the time we performed some basic experimentation and discovered that Chinese IPs (presumably at the behest of the Great Firewall of China, or GFW) would reach out to the US-based bridge and connect to it shortly after the Tor user in China connected, and, if successful, shortly thereafter the connection would be blocked by the GFW. There wasn't time for a detailed investigation and analysis at the time, but that kernel eventually grew into the investigation detailed below. We were, however, able to determine that limiting connections to the bridge relay to only the single IP expected to be its client would, in fact, block the probes and allow the connection to remain open for an extended period (>48 hours in our testing).

Between 05 DEC and 09 DEC 2011, we undertook a detailed and methodical investigation into probing and blocking of Tor connections originating within China. Unfortunately for our analysis, it appears that the GFW's active blocking of connections to Tor bridges had stopped, but we were still able to gather valuable data about the probing performed by the GFW, which previously led directly and verifiably to blocking.

To this end we discovered two types of probing. First, "garbage binary" probes, containing nothing more than arbitrary (but sometimes repeated in later probes) binary data, were experienced by the non-China side of any connection that originated from China to TCP port 443 (HTTPS) in which an SSL negotiation was performed. This probe was performed in near-real-time after the connection was established, implying near-line-rate deep packet inspection (DPI) capabilities. TCP/443 connections not performing an SSL handshake, such as using the obfsproxy obfs2 protocol or a plain-text protocol, did not provoke probing. The purpose of these probes is unknown, and further investigation is difficult to justify when it seems relatively clear that these probes are not aimed at Tor.

The second type of probe, on the other hand, is aimed quite directly at Tor. When a Tor client within China connected to a US-based bridge relay, we consistently found that at the next round 15 minute interval (HH:00, HH:15, HH:30, HH:45), the bridge relay would receive a probe from hosts within China that not only established a TCP connection, but performed an SSL negotiation, an SSL renegotiation, and then spoke the Tor protocol sufficiently to build a one-hop circuit and send a BEGIN_DIR cell. No matter what TCP port the bridge was listening on, once a Tor client from China connected, within 3 minutes of the next 15 minute interval we saw a series of probes including at least one connection speaking the Tor protocol.

The good news is, we were able to isolate which characteristic of the Tor handshake the GFW was using to decide whether or not to initiate these probes. By making a simple change to the list of supported SSL ciphers in the "hello" packet sent by the Tor client within China, we were able to prevent the probes from taking place. This has been documented and is being discussed in ticket #4744. This differs slightly from the method used by Iran to block Tor in September 2011, using the client-side of the SSL negotiation as its trigger rather than the server-side. It is likely, however, that technology capable of targeting either side of the connection to this degree could also target the other side, so it remains important to consider both the server and client sides of the Tor connection when attempting to blend in with normal, benign traffic.

The bad news, however, is that this is happening at all. This probe again implies sophisticated near-line-rate DPI technology, coupled with a system that is aimed directly at Tor, using code that actually speaks the Tor protocol. Clearly there is a target painted firmly on Tor, and it is quite likely that the Chinese will continue to adapt their censorship technology as the Tor Project adapts to them.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though. A number of ideas have been put forward about new protocols, handshakes, and extensions to the Tor protocol that could be used to combat this type of censorship technology in a more long-term-sustainable way. Proposal 190 provides for password authorization for bridge relays. obfsproxy provides an extra layer on top of a Tor connection that makes it look like generic binary data. The Tor v3 link protocol/handshake, currently available and in testing in the 0.2.3.x-alpha series of Tor releases, eliminates SSL renegotiation in Tor session establishment, removing one of Tor's current "sore thumbs" that stick out from normal HTTPS SSL traffic.

You're welcome to check out my full report on this investigation for more detail than I could provide in the blog post here. Thanks very much to everyone who assisted with the investigation and the report! It was fun to investigate and report on this, and I hope to have the opportunity to help out with similar adventures in the future.