JumpBox – A Seamless Browser Proxy for Tor Pluggable Transports

Anonymity systems such as Tor are being blocked by many countries, as they are increasingly being used to circumvent censorship systems. As a response, several pluggable transport (proxy) systems have been developed that obfuscate the first hop of the Tor circuit (i.e., the connection between the Tor client and the bridge node). In this paper, we tackle a common challenge faced by all web-based pluggable transports – the need to perfectly emulate the complexities of a web-browser and web-server. To that end, we propose a new system called the JumpBox that readily integrates with existing pluggable transports and avoids emulation by forwarding the HTTP/HTTPS requests through a real browser and webserver. We evaluate our system using multiple pluggable transports and demonstrate that it imposes minimal additional overhead.