Thank you for the detailed reply Niall.
Perhaps I am missing the obvious, but why would popularity be an issue? I would have thought that the more popular a protocol is then the more advantageous it is to mimic and hide within its traffic. If Maidsafe instances could negotiate and agree to disguise RUDP v2.0 packets with the tell-tale markers and timings of any popular protocols like skype calls, game etc, wouldn’t this then severely limit or complicate the ability of ISP/countries to detect the MaidSafe traffic, let alone block or add 500ms latency to it?
That is more or less the take away I gather from the SkypeMorph: protocol obfuscation for Tor bridges paper:
[quote]Attacks on SkypeMorph.In order to be able to block a SkypeMorph
bridge, the censor either needs to totally ban Skype communications, or
it has to verify the existence of SkypeMorph on a remote Skype node…[/quote]
[quote]SkypeMorph and Other Protocols. Our current implementation of
SkypeMorph is able to imitate arbitrary encrypted protocols over UDP.
The target protocol, Skype in our case, can be replaced by any
encrypted protocol that uses UDP as long as distributions of packet
sizes and inter-arrival times are available.[/quote]
Keith