Authors:
(1) Diwen Xue, University of Michigan;
(2) Reethika Ramesh, University of Michigan;
(3) Arham Jain, University of Michigan;
(4) Arham Jain, Merit Network, Inc.;
(5) J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan;
(6) Jedidiah R. Crandall, Arizona State University/Breakpointing Bad;
(7) Roya Ensaf, University of Michigan. Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Background & Related Work 3 Challenges in Real-world VPN Detection 4 Adversary Model and Deployment 5 Ethics, Privacy, and Responsible Disclosure 6 Identifying Fingerprintable Features and 6.1 Opcode-based Fingerprinting 6.2 ACK-based Fingerprinting 6.3 Active Server Fingerprinting 6.4 Constructing Filters and Probers 7 Fine-tuning for Deployment and 7.1 ACK Fingerprint Thresholds 7.2 Choice of Observation Window N 7.3 Effects of Packet Loss 7.4 Server Churn for Asynchronous Probing 7.5 Probe UDP and Obfuscated OpenVPN Servers 8 Real-world Deployment Setup 9 Evaluation & Findings and 9.1 Results for control VPN flows 9.2 Results for all flows 10 Discussion and Mitigations 11 Conclusion 12 Acknowledgement and References Appendix 7.5 Probe UDP and Obfuscated OpenVPN Servers The active probing scheme in the previous section primarily targets vanilla OpenVPN TCP servers, as it exploits the header length field that is unique to TCP mode that requires packetization. In addition, it works effectively against XORobfuscated servers because the length field is prefixed after the XOR encryption is applied to an OpenVPN packet. This construction allows us to probe XOR-obfuscated servers in the same way as if they had no obfuscation at all. For UDP or other obfuscated servers, our probes are no longer effective because the length field is either not present (UDP) or encrypted (tunnel-based obfuscation). However, a critical observation is that most commercial VPN providers usually offer vanilla TCP servers along with UDP and/or obfuscated variants. This is expected as commercial VPN providers attempt to optimize their VPN’s performance as well as reliability, since tunnel-based obfuscation adds overhead and UDP traffic may encounter more problems than TCP in a firewalled network. Furthermore, the vanilla TCP service is often co-located with the UDP or obfuscated OpenVPN services, presumably due to lower hosting and maintenance cost. They could be on the same host by listening on different ports, or they could be located in adjacent IPs in the same VPN provider subnet. In other words, probing adjacent netblocks of a suspected UDP or obfuscated endpoint may reveal nearby vanilla TCP servers, whose existence corroborates the Filter results. For our Prober deployment on two dedicated measurement machines, we limit our probing to the /29 subnet the target IP belongs to over all TCP ports. This specific subnet size is chosen primarily due to probing resources limitation, and a more well-resourced adversary may expand the probing to larger subnets. With only two measurement machines, the parallelized /29 Prober is able to probe targets generated by a Filter monitoring a 5 Gbps network interface. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Diwen Xue, University of Michigan; (2) Reethika Ramesh, University of Michigan; (3) Arham Jain, University of Michigan; (4) Arham Jain, Merit Network, Inc.; (5) J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan; (6) Jedidiah R. Crandall, Arizona State University/Breakpointing Bad; (7) Roya Ensaf, University of Michigan. Authors: Authors: (1) Diwen Xue, University of Michigan; (2) Reethika Ramesh, University of Michigan; (3) Arham Jain, University of Michigan; (4) Arham Jain, Merit Network, Inc.; (5) J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan; (6) Jedidiah R. Crandall, Arizona State University/Breakpointing Bad; (7) Roya Ensaf, University of Michigan. Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Background & Related Work 2 Background & Related Work 3 Challenges in Real-world VPN Detection 3 Challenges in Real-world VPN Detection 4 Adversary Model and Deployment 4 Adversary Model and Deployment 5 Ethics, Privacy, and Responsible Disclosure 5 Ethics, Privacy, and Responsible Disclosure 6 Identifying Fingerprintable Features and 6.1 Opcode-based Fingerprinting 6 Identifying Fingerprintable Features and 6.1 Opcode-based Fingerprinting 6.2 ACK-based Fingerprinting 6.2 ACK-based Fingerprinting 6.3 Active Server Fingerprinting 6.3 Active Server Fingerprinting 6.4 Constructing Filters and Probers 6.4 Constructing Filters and Probers 7 Fine-tuning for Deployment and 7.1 ACK Fingerprint Thresholds 7 Fine-tuning for Deployment and 7.1 ACK Fingerprint Thresholds 7.2 Choice of Observation Window N 7.2 Choice of Observation Window N 7.3 Effects of Packet Loss 7.3 Effects of Packet Loss 7.4 Server Churn for Asynchronous Probing 7.4 Server Churn for Asynchronous Probing 7.5 Probe UDP and Obfuscated OpenVPN Servers 7.5 Probe UDP and Obfuscated OpenVPN Servers 8 Real-world Deployment Setup 8 Real-world Deployment Setup 9 Evaluation & Findings and 9.1 Results for control VPN flows 9 Evaluation & Findings and 9.1 Results for control VPN flows 9.2 Results for all flows 9.2 Results for all flows 10 Discussion and Mitigations 10 Discussion and Mitigations 11 Conclusion 11 Conclusion 12 Acknowledgement and References 12 Acknowledgement and References Appendix Appendix 7.5 Probe UDP and Obfuscated OpenVPN Servers The active probing scheme in the previous section primarily targets vanilla OpenVPN TCP servers, as it exploits the header length field that is unique to TCP mode that requires packetization. In addition, it works effectively against XORobfuscated servers because the length field is prefixed after the XOR encryption is applied to an OpenVPN packet. This construction allows us to probe XOR-obfuscated servers in the same way as if they had no obfuscation at all. For UDP or other obfuscated servers, our probes are no longer effective because the length field is either not present (UDP) or encrypted (tunnel-based obfuscation). However, a critical observation is that most commercial VPN providers usually offer vanilla TCP servers along with UDP and/or obfuscated variants. This is expected as commercial VPN providers attempt to optimize their VPN’s performance as well as reliability, since tunnel-based obfuscation adds overhead and UDP traffic may encounter more problems than TCP in a firewalled network. Furthermore, the vanilla TCP service is often co-located with the UDP or obfuscated OpenVPN services, presumably due to lower hosting and maintenance cost. They could be on the same host by listening on different ports, or they could be located in adjacent IPs in the same VPN provider subnet. In other words, probing adjacent netblocks of a suspected UDP or obfuscated endpoint may reveal nearby vanilla TCP servers, whose existence corroborates the Filter results. For our Prober deployment on two dedicated measurement machines, we limit our probing to the /29 subnet the target IP belongs to over all TCP ports. This specific subnet size is chosen primarily due to probing resources limitation, and a more well-resourced adversary may expand the probing to larger subnets. With only two measurement machines, the parallelized /29 Prober is able to probe targets generated by a Filter monitoring a 5 Gbps network interface. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv

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