Exploring Unobservable Blockchain-based Covert Channel for Censorship-Resistant Systems

Blockchain-based censorship-resistant systems enable the user to access the blocked content through a covert channel while avoiding a suspicious network connection between the user and the proxy. However, state-of-the-art blockchain-based censorship-resistant schemes cannot satisfy both low communication fees and unobservability, and their method of identifying transactions with covert data may inadvertently expose the covert channel. In this paper, we present Hades, a blockchain-based covert channel framework that aims to circumvent censorship. Hades allows users to encode covert data as a transaction field, and identify transactions with covert data by using another transaction field as a label. We also present the security model for Hades, which defines the unobservability of Hades as the indistinguishability of transactions with covert data from normal transactions. We further propose two cost-friendly and unobservable instantiations of Hades: the basic RDSAC and the improved DDSAC. RDSAC uses private keys to encode covert data and utilizes random factors in the signing process as labels, while incurring a communication delay. DDSAC avoids the delay by encoding covert data into random factors and sampling a transaction amount from normal transactions as the label. We implement a prototype system of Hades and evaluate its performance. Experiment results show that our Hades prototype is unobservable, robust, and efficient. RDSAC and DDSAC can identify 1,654 transactions in 6.054 seconds and 0.071 seconds, respectively. Hades supports 1KB data transfer at $0.44 on the Bitcoin mainnet and cost-free data transfer on the Bitcoin testnet.