skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Ascheman, Anna"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are increasingly being used to protect online users’ privacy and security. However, there is an ongoing arms race between censors that aim to detect and block VPN usage, and VPN providers that aim to obfuscate their services from these censors. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a simple, protocol-agnostic VPN detection technique based on identifying encapsulated TCP behaviors in UDP-based tunnels. We derive heuristics to distinguish TCP-over-UDP VPN traffic from plain UDP traffic using RFC-defined TCP behaviors. Our evaluations on realworld traffic show that this technique can achieve a false positive rate (FPR) of 0.11%, an order of magnitude lower than existing machine learning-based VPN detection methods. We suggest defenses to evade our detection technique and encourage VPN providers to proactively defend against such attacks. 
    more » « less