Researchers Debut Proxy-Less Anonymity Service 116
Trailrunner7 writes "As state-level censorship continues to grow in various countries around the globe in response to political dissent and social change, researchers have begun looking for news ways to help Web users get around these restrictions. Now, a group of university researchers has developed an experimental system called Telex that replaces the typical proxy architecture with a scheme that hides the fact that the users are even trying to communicate at all."
Bad assumption (Score:4, Interesting)
The bad assumption is that government controlled ISPs in said censored nations won't make their own Telex nodes and just intercept traffic before it reaches the web at large. The really bad assumption is that other ISPs between the end user and the fake destination will have Telex nodes to do the dirty work. This method seems to be screaming MITM me.
Re:Bad assumption (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think just any node could interpret the message. It would be built specifically for the node they are using. It also doesn't imply anything about not using other security. The telex message could be (and probably should be) an encrypted communication, so the telex node would just know where it's going, not what it means.
Basically, all this does is allow any website to act as a proxy without being obvious that they're a proxy. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it has any chance of working. Governments will identify possible nodes through either technological means or just good old "social engineering" (snitches) and simply shut off all access to those sites. Or they'll take it a step further and restrict all sites except for a whitelist.
Re:Um. excuse me? (Score:5, Interesting)