What is refraction networking?

Most of today’s censorship circumvention tools use the same fundamental approach: they encrypt the user’s traffic to make it look innocuous, and channel it to a proxy server located outside the censored network. This leads to a fundamental problem: Once the censor discovers the proxy server, the proxy itself becomes just another site to block. If users can find the proxy servers, the censors can too.

In this race to find and use—or find and block—proxy servers, censoring governments enjoy natural, growing advantages over censored users. For example, they can examine all data flowing across their borders in search of disfavored activity. Strategies that rely on friendly servers are failing against increasingly sophisticated state-level censors who can see and control a country’s entire network.

Refraction networking* takes a different approach. Rather than trying to hide individual proxies from censors, refraction brings proxy functionality to the core of the network, through partnership with ISPs and other network operators. This makes censorship much more costly, because it prevents censors from selectively blocking only those servers used to provide Internet freedom. Instead, whole networks outside the censored country provide Internet freedom to users—and any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information.

What work is happening now?

Refraction networking was independently invented in 2011 by three engineering teams. Five protocols exist: Telex and TapDance at the University of Michigan, Cirripede at the University of Illinois, and Curveball and Rebound at Raytheon BBN Technologies. These designs share the same basic premise but represent a range of design choices and technical tradeoffs.

Today, researchers from Michigan, Illinois, and the University of Colorado have formed a coalition to make refraction networking a widely deployed and powerful tool for Internet freedom, with support from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Since 2019, the coalition has been operating a real-world production deployment that provides refraction networking service to more than a million users globally.

What research has been published?

The papers are:

• Operational Deployment
  • Running Refraction Networking for Real
    Benjamin VanderSloot, Sergey Frolov, Jack Wampler, Sze Chuen Tan, Irv Simpson, Michalis Kallitsis, J. Alex Halderman, Nikita Borisov, and Eric Wustrow
    Proc. 20th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS ’20), July 2020.
  • An ISP-Scale Deployment of TapDance
    Sergey Frolov, Fred Douglas, Will Scott, Allison McDonald, Benjamin VanderSloot, Rod Hynes, Adam Kruger, Michalis Kallitsis, David G. Robinson, Nikita Borisov, J. Alex Halderman, and Eric Wustrow
    7th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’17), August 2017.
  • TapDance source code on Github.
  • Announcement on Medium.
• Conjure
  • Conjure: Summoning Proxies from Unused Address Space
    Sergey Frolov, Jack Wampler, Sze Chuen Tan, J. Alex Halderman, Nikita Borisov, and Eric Wustrow
    26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’19), November 2019.
• TapDance
  • TapDance: End-to-Middle Anticensorship without Flow Blocking
    Eric Wustrow, Colleen M. Swanson, and J. Alex Halderman
    23rd USENIX Security Symposium, August 2014.
• Telex
  • Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure
    Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg and J. Alex Halderman
    20th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2011.
  • The Telex web site, with clear visual explanations of the system.
• Rebound
  • Rebound: Decoy Routing on Asymmetric Routes Via Error Messages
    Daniel Ellard, Alden Jackson, Christine Jones, Victoria Manfredi, W. Timothy Strayer, Bishal Thapa, and Megan Van Welie
    40th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN ’15), 2015.
• Curveball
  • Decoy Routing: Toward Unblockable Internet Communication
    Josh Karlin, Daniel Ellard, Alden W. Jackson, Chistine E. Jones, Greg Lauer, David P. Mankins, and W. Timothy Strayer
    1st USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’11), August 2011.
  • Curveball web site with more information and source code.
• Cirripede
  • Cirripede: Circumvention Infrastructure using Router Redirection with Plausible Deniability
    Amir Houmansadr, Giang T. K. Nguyen, Matthew Ceasar and Nikita Borisov
    18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’11), October 2011.

Beyond the work of our coalition, several other research papers directly address issues connected with refraction networking:

Slitheen: Perfectly Imitated Decoy Routing through Traffic Replacement (CCS '16)
Optimizing the Placement of Implicit Proxies (Princeton CS Technical report)
Routing Around Decoys (CCS ‘12)
No Direction Home: The True Cost of Routing Around Decoys (NDSS ‘14)

How can I get involved or find out more?

The refraction networking coalition is working to partner with network operators. If you’d like to find out more or help support our efforts, please contact us at team@refraction.network.

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* The term decoy routing has been used ambiguously to refer to this overall family of approaches and to a specific scheme described by Karlin et al. We use refraction networking as an umbrella term to refer to all the schemes.