MIRACE: Multipath Integrated Routing Architecture for Censorship Evasion

System Design

MIRACE (Multipath Integrated Routing Architecture for Censorship Evasion) is designed to enhance privacy, anonymity, and censorship resistance in Internet communications. The system addresses vulnerabilities in existing anonymization networks, such as Tor, which are theoretically susceptible to website fingerprinting and correlation attacks.

It focuses on providing unobservable and anonymous mixnet traffic through multi-path and multi-encapsulation routing, ensuring that sensitive communications remain resilient against surveillance and traffic analysis.

Architecture Overview

MIRACE integrates several core mechanisms:

• Multipath Routing: Traffic is split across multiple independent circuits, each composed of several nodes, to reduce correlation and deanonymization risks.
• Mixed Circuits: Each circuit may use different covert channels layered on top of TLS, QUIC tunnels, and WebRTC media streams, allowing distinct segments of a single circuit to leverage different traffic obfuscation methods.

By combining these techniques, MIRACE strengthens anonymity guarantees without imposing significant latency or bandwidth penalties. The system has been implemented and validated, demonstrating throughput on the order of Mbps and latency suitable for diverse applications, while maintaining resistance to website fingerprinting attacks.

Research Questions

1. Effectiveness: Can MIRACE successfully prevent website fingerprinting and correlation attacks compared to traditional mixnet or Tor-based approaches?
2. Performance: How does multi-path routing and multi-encapsultation integration affect latency, throughput, and overall network efficiency?
3. Deployability: Can MIRACE be deployed in a real-world scenario while maintaining robustness against adaptive adversaries?

Bibtex

@mastersthesis{Pereira2024thesis,
    author = {Hugo Gamaliel dos Santos Pereira},
    title = {MIRACE: Multi-Path Integrated Routing Architecture for Censorship Evasion Privacy-Preserved Internet Communication with Unobservable and Anonymous Mixnet Traffic},
    school = {NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon},
    year = {2024},
    url = {https://run.unl.pt/bitstream/10362/178441/1/Pereira_2024.pdf},
}

Acknowledgments

This work was conducted at NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University Lisbon. The author acknowledges support from advisors and fellow colleagues who provided guidance on the development and evaluation of the MIRACE system.