We present the Proteus system for censorship circumvention. Proteus provides a programmable protocol environment in which new communication protocols can be expressed as concise and comprehensible specification files. This design allows clients and proxies to quickly respond to new censorship strategies just by installing new specification files. Proteus improves on prior programmable designs by improving host safety from malicious specifications, providing a specification language that is complete and comprehensible to non-specialists, and supporting multiple simultaneous protocols at a proxy for versioning and localization. This paper represents work in progress and provides an overview of the Proteus design, as well as examples showing that it can express existing encrypted protocols.
@inproceedings{proteus-foci2023,
title = {Proteus: Programmable Protocols for Censorship Circumvention},
author = {Wails, Ryan and Jansen, Rob and Johnson, Aaron and Sherr, Micah},
booktitle = {Workshop on Free and Open Communication on the Internet},
year = {2023},
}