Recent & Upcoming Talks

In this paper, we present the first non-trivial TCP-based DDoS amplification attack by weaponizing censoring middleboxes. We develop a novel mechanism to discover these amplification attacks and perform Internet-wide measurements to measure the threat censoring middleboxes pose. We find hundreds of thousands of IP addresses that offer amplification factors greater than 100×. We also report on network phenomena that causes some of the TCP-based attacks to be so effective as to technically have infinite amplification factor (after the attacker sends a constant number of bytes, the reflector generates traffic indefinitely).

In this talk, we will show that censorship infrastructures can pose significant threats to the entire Internet.

This session presents Geneva, a genetic algorithm that automatically discovers new ways to circumvent censorship, and includes a live demo of evading censorship.

In this talk, we will present a drastic departure from the previously manual evade/detect cycle. We will introduce Geneva, a novel genetic algorithm we developed that automatically discovers how to manipulate packet streams to evade censors. We deployed Geneva around the world live against real-world censors in China, India, and Kazakhstan.

In this talk, we propose a drastic departure from the manual evade/detect cycle: using artificial intelligence to adaptively probe censoring regimes and automatically discover strategies for circumventing them. We will present the design of our genetic algorithm-based architecture, and the results thus far from applying it to in-lab and real network censors, including the Great Firewall of China.

In this lightning talk, I discuss recent work studying the lack of certificate revocation checking in mobile applications.