Paper Info
Title
Efficiently bypassing SNI-based HTTPS filtering
Abstract
Encrypted Internet traffic is an essential element to enable security and privacy in the Internet. Surveys show that websites are more and more being served over HTTPS. They highlight an increase of 48% of sites using TLS over the past year, justifying the tendency that the Web is going to be encrypted. This motivates the development of new tools and methods to monitor and filter HTTPS traffic. This paper handles the latest technique for HTTPS traffic filtering that is based on the Server Name Indication (SNI) field of TLS and which has been recently implemented in many firewall solutions. Our main contribution is an evaluation of the reliability of this SNI extension for properly identifying and filtering HTTPS traffic. We show that SNI has two weaknesses, regarding (1) backward compatibility and (2) multiple services using a single certificate. We demonstrate thanks to a web browser plug-in called “Escape” that we designed and implemented, how these weaknesses can be practically used to bypass firewalls and monitoring systems relying on SNI. The results show positive evaluation (firewall's rules successfully bypassed) for all tested websites.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/INM.2015.7140423
Integrated Network Management
Keywords
Field
DocType
Internet,Web sites,cryptography,data privacy,firewalls,hypermedia,information filtering,network servers,online front-ends,telecommunication traffic,transport protocols,Escape,HTTPS filtering,Internet privacy,Internet security,Internet traffic encryption,SNI,Web browser plug-in,Web site,firewall rule,server name indication
Internet security,Firewall (construction),Computer science,Computer security,Server Name Indication,Server,Computer network,Encryption,Internet traffic,Backward compatibility,The Internet
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.41
2
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wazen M. Shbair180.92
Thibault Cholez210011.89
Antoine Goichot330.41
Isabelle Chrisment422525.75