Spam
====
This tunnel implements Ethernet/IP over spam mails. Before the data is going
out it is encoded to look like an ordinary spam mail.
A friend told me about a "Network Protocols and Architectures" lecture,
a course given at TU-Berlin, featuring this task as a "cristmas homework",
showing a slide from Dan Kaminsky talking about this idea for bypassing the
Great Firewall of China.
Installation and requirements
=============================
You need either an e-mail account reachable via IMAP or a MX record pointing
to your server. Configuration is done via conf.py. Currently the other side
of the connection needs to be specified as 'mailTo' (see conf.py).
How it works
============
Each outgoing network packet is encoded to text looking like spam mails. The
encoder/decoder can easily be replaced by something else but all clients need
to have the same dictionary/language. The packet is split up into 3bit entities
and then decoded into words using the current dictionary. An Ethernet packet
(mtu 1500 bytes) is blown up to 74kb of spam text.
Every packet is currently mailed to the configured 'mailTo' address. Incoming
messages are fetched via imap or, if running as an smtpd, directly parsed on
delivery.
Multiple Clients
================
Having support for multiple clients would be an awesome thing! Currently only
point to point connections are available. The problem with having multiple
clients is, that somehow a client needs to know where another client can be
found. Many concepts exist to solve this problem. The straight forward approach
of a single authorative server would work but introduces a single point of
failure, making the network vulnerable to censorship and server failures.
As said in the section below: This needs to be implemented. ;)
What could be done
==================
* allow the spam tunnel to run as an IP tunnel, configurable via config
* implement support for multiple clients
* support exchange of encoding dictionary prior to sending/receiving data
* add support to send mails directly via smtp, not via a specific smtp server
Licensing
=========
Written by Sebastian Lohff <seba@seba-geek.de>
Published under the GPLv3 or later
Sebastian Lohff
6c89f6041d