[tor-project] hackweek starting this Monday at 15UTC!

[Gaba]

Hi!

Next week we are hacking on small projects all week! There are 10
proposals so far from visualizing metrics data to adding onion services
v3 support to arti.

To kickoff the week we will have an opening session on **Monday March
29th at 15UTC**. Projects will be presented at that session and teams
will be created. The link for the opening session room will be posted on
Monday. We will close the hackweek on Friday with a demo session where
teams will be able to show the work done during the week.


You can take a look at the proposed projects in
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/hackweek

1 Torify signal-cli with torsocks
Summary: Work through blocking bugs for getting signal-cli working with
torsocks. Interesting because signal is being blocked in some locales.
Lead by jnewsome and/or dgoulet


2 Prometheus alerts for anti-censorship metrics
Summary: We have BridgeDB exporting prometheus metrics so far, and we
could implement this for Snowflake. It would be great if we could get
alerts when usage changes to notify us of possible censorship events.
Somewhat related, it would also be nice to get alerts when default
bridge usage drops off suddenly or directly connecting Tor users from
different regions.
Lead by cohosh and anarcat


3 Prototype network-namespace-based torsocks
Summary: Use network namespaces (or maybe something else?) to run target
software in an environment where it can't talk to the real network; it
can only talk to the tor socks port and/or some "shim" adapter. Might be
able to remove or lessen dependence on LD_PRELOAD (which isn't available
everywhere, can be "escaped", and can be a bit fragile). If we continued
to use LD_PRELOAD could at least be used to prevent accidental
connections to the real network.
Lead by jnewsome and/or dgoulet


4 Add support for UDP sockets over onion services, possibly with
enabling support for WebRTC in Tor Browser
Lead by sysrqb


5 Visualize Tor metrics's data in ways that it can be useful for community
Summary: The goal is to have a dashboard with Tor usage per country in a
way that is easy to see big changes happening. Right now we need to
select each country to see the Tor usage. It would be good to have a way
to see all the countries and the onews where usage is increasing (via
bridge and direct connection)
Lead by gus and gaba


6 Prototype Rust+Arti-based HTTP frontend cache for directory authorities
Summary: Directory authorities are under a lot of unnecessary load from
excessive download requests.  We have other projects in mind to reduce
those requests, but one workaround is to add a frontend cache in front
of one or more of the authorities' HTTP ports.  With this project we'll
write a Rust server use Arti's download and validation code to fetch
directory information from an authority, and expose that information via
a set of HTTP requests.  With luck, our code will be reuseable in the
future when relays or authorities are rewritten in Rust.
Lead by nickm



7 Onionshare download accelerator
Summary: Journalists are requesting ways to download large files from
onion services faster. This is actually possible already with HTTP,
without any Tor client modifications. By splitting up requests into 250k
chunks using HTTP range requests, and using SOCKS username and password
to allocate these requests properly onto different circuits, we can hit
~6 megabytes/sec per guard (so ~12 megabytes/sec with 2 gaurds), with a
custom HTTP download acelerator. This download accelerator could be
provided as part of onionshare. For more details, see
https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare/issues/1295.
Lead by mike


8 Vanguards doc updates, bugfixes, packages for onionshare and/or Tor
Browser
Summary: The vanguards Tor control port addon provides defense against
Guard discovery attacks, as well as other attacks against onion
services, onion clients, and even Tor Browser exit traffic. Vanguards is
in need of some doc updates, bugfixes, and we could even package it for
one of onionshare or Tor Browser. Packaging it with Onionshare also
helps improve the security properties of the above download accelerator
item. See the bugtracker for specific items:
https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/issues
Lead by mike


9 Circuit Padding Simulator
Summary: The Tor circuit padding framework is under active use by
researchers to improve padding defenses against website traffic
fingerprinting, and onion service circuit fingerprinting. The simulator
is in need of update to the latest Tor release, as well as in need of
performance improvements, and a more accurate way to deal with
time-based features. See
https://github.com/pylls/circpad-sim/blob/master/README.md
Lead by mike



10 Onion service v3 support for arti
Summary: arti currently does not do v3 onion services. Let's do some
solid work towards making that possible.
Lead by asn

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