Comparisons

WATER vs. other pluggable transport designs

We evaluate WATER against other pluggable transport designs in terms of the following features:

• Hot-swappable: Can the transport be loaded and unloaded without recompling the host application?
• Host Isolation: Does the transport execute in an isolated environment (e.g., a sandbox) and with limited access to the host resources?
• Compatibility Guarantee: Can the host application be transport-agnostic and still work with any transport that implements the interface?
• Cross-language Deployment: Can the transport be implemented in a different programming language than the host application?

Feature	PTs	Marionette	Proteus	WATER
Hot-swappable	❌	✅	✅	✅
Host Isolation	❌	⚠️	✅	✅
Compatibility Guarantee	❌	⚠️	✅	✅
Cross-language Deployment	❌	❌	❌	✅

References

• PTs (pluggabletransports.info)
• Marionette: A Programmable Network Traffic Obfuscation System (USENIX Security’15)
• Proteus: Programmable Protocols for Censorship Circumvention (FOCI 2023)