Censor-buster Peek-A-Booty goes public

[R. A. Hettinga]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24099.html


  19 February 2002
  Updated: 10:00 GMT

Censor-buster Peek-A-Booty goes public
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 18/02/2002 at 08:36 GMT

Peek-A-Booty, cDc's much vaunted anonymity app, is vaporware no more - it
went public at the landmark CodeCon conference in San Francisco's DNA
Lounge on Sunday.

Peek-A-Booty is designed to let surfers access sites blocked by government
restrictions, and is essentially, a distributed proxy network. It uses a
peer-to-peer model, masking the identity of each node. So the user can
route around censorship that blocks citizens' access to specific IP
addresses, because the censor doesn't know they're going there. If you're a
Peek-A-Booty node, you might be doing it on their behalf. So the software
isn't itself a browser, but simply requires the user to use localhost in
the proxy field of their preferred browser.

Working out the general architecture was the easy bit. The tricky bit,
explained cDc developers Paul Baranowski and Joey deVilla (and relax,
they're happy to use their own names now), was anticipating and thwarting a
wide variety of the attack measures, from outside or inside the
Peek-A-Booty network itself. The design process took six months, beginning
in July 2000, but coding only started in earnest six months ago, after a
hiatus.

Peek-A-Booty nodes send out standard SSL, so the censorware can't
distinguish the request from any other secure electronic transaction: the
authors describe this as a form of steganography. But a rogue node inside
such a network could harvest the addresses of all the other nodes, so
Peek-A-Booty deploys a "virtual circuit", borrowing ideas from the Crowds
anonymous web browser.

"Most P2P systems really want their nodes to be found, our problem is that
you want to be found, but you really don't want to be found," said
Baronowski. So Peek-A-Booty uses random forwarding based on probability -
no one knows where the connection originated except the originator - and
eschews time to live packets. For security, there's no attempt at initial
discovery - you'll get sent details of a node by word of mouth, or from
some other secure source. Baranowski and deVilla expect that citizens
groups (NGOs) will become trusted servers. But as a one-time operation, you
can use Peek-A-Booty to download Peek-A-Booty.

The demo - of version 0.75 running on Windows XP- showed off the web-based
configuration management tool and the centerpiece, the Peekabear screen
saver. Which is very cute. (We've been promised screenshots and will add
them to this story as soon as they arrive).

Joey told us that the code was pretty standard Unix code (on the wxWindows
[and not Cygnus Windows, as earlier reported] environment), so a Linux and
even a Mac OS X port should be trivial. But Windows is on most desktops,
and for Peek-A-Booty to work effectively - like SETI - it needs
participating nodes, so that's where the numbers are.

It's a single threaded architecture right now, and grabs one link at time,
but the authors say it runs pretty well on a low-end PII, and the demo
proved this. "This will be fixed," they promise.

The pair are working on the code full time, so they need funding. There's a
basic website, [note the .org TLD - there's erm, booty of the regular kind
at the .com] but you'll need to mail the authors to get access to CVS tree.

The pair got a tremendous ovation from third day CodeCon attendees, and if
it withstands attack, will be a boost for human rights. Bravo. ®


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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