What is a castle pluggable?

[Lion.Kanzen]

I found this in YouTube

[fcxSanya]

This is some university research project related to hidden transmission of textual data via multiplayer sessions of RTS games (0 A.D. is used as an example). There is a link to a related github repo in the video description and it in turn contains a link to the related paper: Games Without Frontiers: Investigating Video Games as a Covert Channel

[historic_bruno]

That's really interesting, I never imagined people would use games that way, much less 0 A.D.

[rnithyanand]

Hey!

I am one of the authors of this paper. I'd be happy to answer any questions about Castle. fcxSanya is right about the general idea behind the system. The idea is to use video games to establish covert communication channels that are hard to detect. This WIRED article did a good job of explaining the ideas behind our system: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/app-hides-secret-messages-starcraft-style-games/

There's more to come from Castle! We're specifically targeting making Castle a Tor pluggable transport by the end of this year.

A little note on the relationship between 0 A.D. and Castle:

0 A.D. is our go to game for demos. While we have Castle working over other big titles, we cannot release that code for legal reasons. However, we do not recommend using Castle over 0 A.D. in the real world, due to the lack of encryption and authentication of the move communication channel. The good news is, Castle is highly adaptable and can be moved over other RTS-games in about a day, if required.

[leper]

Just some 0 A.D. related input on the paper: the selection size can be increased by changing the value of MAX_SELECTION_SIZE in binaries/data/mods/public/gui/session/selection.js, and the game is under GPLv2+ (or any later version clause).

Apart from that quite interesting read.