Usually, I do not make advertisement for conference and call for papers.  But for Privacy Security & Trust 2012 (PST 2012), I will make an exception.  If you go on the site, you will understand easily why  :Wink:

The preferred topics are:

• Privacy Preserving / Enhancing Technologies
• Critical Infrastructure Protection
  Network and Wireless Security
  Operating Systems Security
  Intrusion Detection Technologies
  Secure Software Development and Architecture
  PST Challenges in e-Services, e.g. e-Health, e-Government, e-Commerce
  Network Enabled Operations
  Digital forensics
  Information Filtering, Data Mining and Knowledge from Data
  National Security and Public Safety
  Security Metrics
  Recommendation, Reputation and Delivery Technologies
  Continuous Authentication
  Trust Technologies, Technologies for Building Trust in e-Business Strategy
  Observations of PST in Practice, Society, Policy and Legislation
  Digital Rights Management
  Identity and Trust management
  PST and Cloud Computing
  Human Computer Interaction and PST
  Implications of, and Technologies for, Lawful Surveillance
  Biometrics, National ID Cards, Identity Theft
  PST and Web Services / SOA
  Privacy, Traceability, and Anonymity
  Trust and Reputation in Self-Organizing Environments
  Anonymity and Privacy vs. Accountability
  Access Control and Capability Delegation
  Representations and Formalizations of Trust in Electronic and Physical Social Systems

The submission deadline is 18 March 2012.

Usually when you want to avoid censorship on Internet, you used tools such as TOR and other anonymizing proxies.  Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman propose another solution: TELEX.  The idea is elegant:

• The client software hides, using steganography, the query to a censored site in a query for a high-traffic innocent site.  As the request is hidden, the censorship should not detect it.
• Stations outside of the frontier of the censoring state, within collaborating routers, will extract the hidden query and route it to the censored site.  For that purpose, they will use Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).
• The censored site and the client enter into a secure channel, thus avoiding the censor to analyze the exchanged data.
• The collaborating router “impersonates” the innocent site in traffic to avoid detection.

The paper presents a nice threat analysis explaining all the trade-offs to remain stealthy, the strategy that optimally locates the collaborating stations, and how to ideally select the “innocent” site.   It is an excellent work that was presented at Usenix 2011.

The main issue is of course to find collaborating routers.  This would require either collaborating NSPs or state-funded infrastructure.  This is most probably the trickiest part to solve.  An utopia?

Alex Halderman, the last author, is well known by the medias.   He is the one (at that time he used John A) who in 2002 demonstrated the weakness of Sony anti-rip solution (shift key), or more recently how to retrieve keys after a cold boot.