Facet: Streaming over Videoconferencing for Censorship Circumvention

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Facet, an unobservable transport service for social video sites. Facet evades detection by Internet censors by streaming social videos over Skype calls, and applying a novel traffic-analysis countermeasure called video morphing. We report on the performance and security of a prototype implementation of Facet and find that a single Facet server can support roughly 20 simultaneous sessions, while providing strong unobservability: using the best known traffic analysis methods, a censor seeking to block 90% of Facet calls would need to block over 40% of all Skype calls. An additional benefit of our prototype implementation is that it avoids the distribution problem: clients can use Facet without installing any additional software.