Tholian® Warps

Tholian® Warps is a proactive and adaptive Mesh Network Router.

It tries to automatically detect and bypass censorship and throttling measurements at all cost. Programmable routing, traffic compression, traffic scattering, dynamic encryption rotation and other features are part of this experimental research project.

The goal of this project is to find out how feasible common NAT breaking and firewall bypassing techniques are and whether they can be used to build a reliable mesh network that's based on a peer-to-peer architecture.

Network Architecture

1. A Warps tunnel tunnels network traffic through a peer or gateway to access the internet.

2. A Warps tunnel uses the initial configured network protocol.

3. A Warps peer tunnels network traffic through other peer or gateway instances.

4. A Warps peer rotates the used network protocols.

5. All Warps peer or gateway instances use optimizers to reduce web asset file sizes.

6. All Warps peer or gateway instances use DNS over TLS to resolve relayed DNS queries.

7. All Warps instances use a local ProxyCache and ResolverCache.

8. All Warps instances can rotate encryption keys and can scatter network traffic on-demand.

How to use Tunnels and Gateways

The easiest way to use Warps is with running a Warps gateway on your own VPS that is connected to the internet, and a locally running Warps tunnel.

As a defaulted network protocol, it is best to use dns, as that usually works to bypass typical firewall setups. Alternative supported network protocols are documented further down in this document.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your local machine
tholian-warps tunnel --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053;
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

How to use Peers

Warps can be used peer-to-peer and discover locally and globally running Warps gateway instances via multicast DNS-SD. This mode currently needs a Warps gateway or peer instance that is known among all peers, so that keys can be exchanged.

Note that a Warps peer instance can change network protocols on-demand, and that behavior is different from the tunnel mode which prevails the given initial network protocol.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your local machine
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053; # start a local peer, and exchange public keys
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

How to use Proxy Chains

Warps can be chained via multiple proxies, without a limit on how many network hops you want to the public internet. In this example, we are routing local web traffic through 3 instances before the traffic hits the clearnet.

# On your VPS server
tholian-warps gateway --protocol=dns --port=1053;

# On your second VPS server
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.7 --port=1053;

# On your third VPS server
tholian-warps peer --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.8 --port=1053;

# On your local machine
# local -> 1.3.3.9 -> 1.3.3.8 -> 1.3.3.7 -> internet
tholian-warps tunnel --protocol=dns --host=1.3.3.9 --port=1053;
curl -x localhost:8080 http://google.com;

Usage

🚧 Highly Experimental at this point - Use at own risk! 🚧

bash build.sh;
sudo cp ./build/tholian-warps /usr/bin/tholian-warps;

# Show CLI usage help
tholian-warps;

Data Compressors

These are the data compressors that have been implemented:

• compressors/text/css
• compressors/text/html
• compressors/text/js
• compressors/image/jpeg
• compressors/image/png

Network Protocols

These are the transport protocols that have been implemented:

• dns or protocols/dns implements DNS Exfiltration
• http or protocols/http implements HTTP Smuggling and DNS over HTTP
• https or protocols/https implements HTTPS Smuggling and DNS over HTTPS
• icmp or protocols/icmp implements ICMP Knocking and DNS over ICMP
• ssh or protocols/ssh implements SSH Tunneling and DNS over SSH
• socks or protocols/socks implements SOCKS Routing (e.g. for TOR/I2P usage)
• protocols/test implements the Spy testing data structures

Test Coverage

These are the go test files that have been implemented:

• structs/ProxyCache
• structs/ResolverCache
• utils/net/url/IsTrackingParameter
• utils/net/url/IsXSSParameter
• utils/net/url/ResolveCache
• utils/net/url/ToHostAndPort
• utils/net/url/ToHost
• utils/protocols/http/IsFilteredHeader
• protocols/dns/Resolver
• protocols/dns/Proxy
• protocols/dns/Tunnel
• protocols/dns/tunnel/ToRecordName
• protocols/http/Proxy
• protocols/http/Tunnel

License

AGPL3