Recommended Citation
Wilson, S., Tian, S., & Kamali, S. (2025). Shaperd: Easily Adoptable Real-Time Traffic Shaper for Fully Encrypted Protocols. Free and Open Communications on the Internet.
BibTeX
@article{wilson2026shaperd,
title={Shaperd: Easily Adoptable Real-Time Traffic Shaper for Fully Encrypted Protocols},
author={Wilson, Sarah and Tian, Stella and Kamali, Sina},
journal={Free and Open Communications on the Internet},
year={2026}
}
Summary
In this paper, we introduce Shaperd, a real-time traffic shaper built to help fully encrypted protocol-based tools stay harder to detect in censoring environments. Instead of requiring major redesigns, Shaperd is meant to be practical to adopt and works directly on packet contents to shape traffic behavior on the fly. Its constraint-based approach lets users tune traffic flows to match desired features, which can help defend against modern passive analysis and active probing techniques used by censors. Early results are encouraging: Shaperd adds only minimal throughput overhead while improving resilience.