Abstract
Censorship-circumvention tools are in an arms race against censors. The censors study all traffic passing into and out of their controlled sphere, and try to disable censorship-circumvention tools without completely shutting down the Internet. Tools aim to shape their traffic patterns to match unblocked programs, so that simple traffic profiling cannot identify the tools within a reasonable number of traces; the censors respond by deploying firewalls with increasingly sophisticated deep-packet inspection. Cryptography hides patterns in user data but does not evade censorship if the censor can recognize patterns in the cryptography itself. In particular, elliptic-curve cryptography often transmits points on known elliptic curves, and those points are easily distinguishable from uniform random strings of bits.
This paper introduces high-security high-speed elliptic-curve systems in which elliptic-curve points are encoded so as to be indistinguishable from uniform random strings. At a lower level, this paper introduces a new bijection between strings and about half of all curve points; this bijection is applicable to every odd-characteristic elliptic curve with a point of order 2, except for curves of $j$-invariant 1728. This paper also presents guidelines to construct, and two examples of, secure curves suitable for these encodings.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 2013 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'13, Berlin, Germany, November 4-8, 2013) |
Editors | A.-R. Sadeghi, V.D. Gligor, M. Yung |
Place of Publication | New York |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
Pages | 967-979 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-2477-9 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Event | conference; 20th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security; 2013-11-04; 2013-11-08 - Duration: 4 Nov 2013 → 8 Nov 2013 |
Conference
Conference | conference; 20th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security; 2013-11-04; 2013-11-08 |
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Period | 4/11/13 → 8/11/13 |
Other | 20th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security |