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2014). Over 850,000 people took part in it and
different events were held on five continents - from
Ireland to India, California to South Africa. A
campaign calling for a “free, open and truly global
Internet” was launched by Tim Berners-Lee to mark
the 25th anniversary of World Wide Web invention.
It becomes evident that Internet surveillance era has
brought a huge increase of the violation of privacy.
As a response to the violation of privacy, Bruce
Schneier wrote the article "The US government has
betrayed the Internet. We need to take it back."
(Schneier, 2013). The main idea of this article was
that the engineering community need to bring back
Internet as it used to be to the people - (Schneier,
2013) "This is not the Internet the world needs, or
the Internet its creators envisioned. We need to take
it back. And by we, I mean the engineering
community. Yes, this is primarily a political
problem, a policy matter that requires political
intervention. But this is also an engineering
problem, and there are several things engineers can
– and should – do." Guided by this idea, we started
the CryptoCloak project.
The basic idea of the CryptoCloak can be
described as the following: we will use the solid and
secure algorithms that have been proved as secure,
but do the encryption in a clandestine manner. The
automatic filtering rules of the spying agencies will
notice just a cheap chat conversations, while the real
encrypted information will be incorporated deeply in
that cheap chat. The cheap chat will be our cloak to
encrypted information.
According to (Regalado, 2013), computer
scientists are involved in enabling intrusion on
individual privacy and this lead to breaking the code
of ethics (ACM Council, 1992). This project will be
our attempt to follow the basic idea of (Schneier,
2013) and to enable use of the code of ethics in the
right way – to contribute to society and human well-
being without doing harm to others, and with
respecting the privacy of others.
Section 2 gives an overview of existing solution
related to the privacy protection in Internet
communication. In Section 3 the idea and
implementation of the CryptoCloak project are
described, with an example of its usage. Section 4
gives an overview of further work, and the paper is
concluded in Section 5.
2 RELATED WORK
To the best of our knowledge, there are no chat
applications that provide private communication the
way the CryptoCloak does. Most of related solutions
use steganography - the act of concealing data in
plain sight. Steganography application in network
provides a possibility to carry on hidden information
over Internet seemingly like innocent Internet traffic.
Authors in (Mazurczyk et.al., 2013) presented
results of their research in the field of network
steganography to show how the network
steganography can be used exploiting a common use
of the Internet. SkyDe program exploits silence
packets sent during the voice communication over
Skype to send hidden information. StegTorrent
program exploits the weakness of BitTorrent, that
BitTorrent user often shares a data file (or pieces of
the file) with many recipients at once. The third
presented research resulted with StegSuggest
steganography program targets the feature Google
Suggest, which lists the 10 most popular search
phrases given a string of letters the user has entered
in Google’s search box. Wireless Padding, or WiPad
method is related to Wi-Fi Networks weaknesses, on
networks that use the data-encoding technique
known as OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing).
Internet censorship by government becomes an
increasingly common practice worldwide. Between
Internet users and censors now the "arms race" is
started. For encrypted conversation over the Internet
a lot of applications can be found. The most known
one is Tor (Tor, 2014). It can be described as a
"network of virtual tunnels". Tor provides
protection from a common form of Internet
surveillance known as "traffic analysis" by
distributing transactions over several places on the
Internet. This idea is similar to twisty - hard to
follow route in order to throw of somebody who is
tailing you. As a camouflage proxy for Tor,
StegoTorus was developed. StegoTorus improves
the resilience of Tor to fingerprinting attacks and
delivers usable performance (Weinberg et.al., 2012).
Cryptocat (open source software) (CryptoCat,
2014) uses modern web technologies to provide easy
to use, accessible encrypted chat. It is developed as
plug-in for most popular web browsers. Chat
conversation is encrypted before sending — even the
Cryptocat network itself can't read it.
Spying engines do the traffic analysis in the
following way: (1) filter the content looking for
particular keywords, e.g. bomb, terrorism, etc.;
content will be analyzed to prevent potential
terroristic attacks or similar issues, (2) any encrypted
content will be stored for further analysis, (3)
noticing cheap chat conversations, e.g. "Hello!",
"How are you?" - will be ignored. To provide spying
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