SWEET: Serving the Web by Exploiting Email Tunnels

Abstract

Open communication over the Internet poses serious threats to countries with repressive regimes, leading to the development and dissemination of control mechanisms within their networks. Unfortunately, control-based circumvention systems do not provide high-availability safeguards for their users, as control can easily identify and thus disrupt the traffic of these systems using advanced control techniques today. In this research, we suggest a web service by exploiting email tunnels (SWEET), a high-resistance controlled infrastructure. SWEET works by including controlled user traffic within emails that are transmitted through public email services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Because the SWEET process is not associated with any specific email provider, we say that censorship will need to block email connections together to disable SWEET, which is unlikely because email is an important part of the Internet today. Through experiments on a prototype of our system, we found SWEET performance sufficient for web browsing. In particular, regular websites are downloaded in a few seconds. Terms of index - circumvention of censorship, e-mail communications, traffic packaging.