[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-01-18

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu Jan 18 17:26:50 UTC 2024


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-01-18-15.57.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Anti-censorship
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, January 25 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: cohosh

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

This week's Facilitator: shelikhoo


== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the 
Tor Project and Tor community.


== Links to Useful documents ==
     * Our anti-censorship roadmap:
         * 
Roadmap:https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards
     * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home
     * Past meeting notes can be found at:
         * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
     * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on:
         * All needs review tickets:
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&assignee_id=None
         * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
             * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
         * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=Sponsor%20150


== Announcements ==

     *

== Discussion ==

     * DTLS anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS
         * Useful for snowflake: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40014
         * Sean DuBois (from pion) has been interested in this and may 
have ideas on what this library could look like
     * SQS rendezvous deployment
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/214
         * almost ready for final merge, any objections to doing so?
         * can announce the new rendezvous method on forum and bbs as 
before with ampcache
         * will have a look at possible attack by flooding the service 
to generate significant bill
             * AWS may or may not support setting billing limits. Can at 
least set billing alerts.
             * Possibly use prepaid card with limited funds.
         * Future plan is to componentize the broker and make rendezvous 
methods more modular, not part of the SQS work though
             * 
https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/26092
             * Also encrypt rendezvous messages separately from the 
rendezvous channel, 
https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/22945
     * Our docker containers are out of date for snowflake and obfs4
         * Have a version of tor that soon will be EOL
         * shelikhoo will update them from 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/docker-obfs4-bridge 
and https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/docker-snowflake-proxy

== Actions ==



== Interesting links ==

     *

== Reading group ==
     * We will discuss "" on
         *
         * Questions to ask and goals to have:
             * What aspects of the paper are questionable?
             * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?
             * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work?
             * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes 
that others will pick it up?


== Updates ==
Name:
         This week:
             - What you worked on this week.
         Next week:
             - What you are planning to work on next week.
         Help with:
             - Something you need help with.

cecylia (cohosh): 2024-01-18
     Last week:
         - Lox + Tor Browser integration
         - Found a fix for snowflake shadow simulations
             - https://github.com/shadow/shadow/pull/3279
         - Contributed to discussion on missing shadow feature policy
             - https://github.com/shadow/shadow/issues/3280
     This week:
         - Review of final SQS rendezvous changes
         - Lox + Tor Browser integration
         - rebase and try out manifest v3 patch
         - Conjure bridge maintenance
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-01-18
     Last week:
         - started to review draft MR for unreliable data channels, 
merged cosmetic changes to main 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/219
         - posted summary of snowflake bridge users in 2023 
https://forum.torproject.org/t/snowflake-bridge-metrics-2023-year-in-review/11149
     Next week:
         - review draft MR for unreliable data channels 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/219
         - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors 
is nonzero 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40262#note_2886018
             - parent: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40267
         - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
         - move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:

meskio: 2023-12-21
     Last week:
         - grant writing
     Next week:


Shelikhoo: 2024-01-18
     Last Week:
                 - HTTPS distributors in rdsys: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
                 - Merge request reviews
     Next Week/TODO:
                 - HTTPS distributors in rdsys: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
                 - update container image for snowflake-proxy and 
obfs4-proxy

onyinyang: 2023-01-11
     Last week(s):
         - Finished Telegram bot dev
         - Continue to support Lox wasm stubs as needed
         - Holiday!

     This week:
         - Bug fixing and other things that come up as lox integration 
is rolled out
         - document API for lox client/server requests
         - Other Lox bug fixes/improvements
         - attempt hyper upgrade again

theodorsm: 2023-01-11
         Last weeks:
             - Currently in the start phase of writing my master thesis 
(to be finished late june 2024) in communication technology on reducing 
distinguishability of DTLS. The goal is to implement a validated DTLS 
anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS (useful for Snowflake).
         Next weeks:
             - Talk with Sean DuBois about contributing to adding 
anti-fingerprinting capabilities to the pion library
         Help with:
             - Find recent data set of captured DTLS traffic


(long term things were discussed at the meeting!): 
https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep
                     - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox
buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are
distributed/use in practice
                          Question: What makes a bridge usable for a
given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the
most appropriate resources to people?
                                  1. Are there some obvious grouping
strategies that we can already consider?
                                   e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower
bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to
be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)
                                  2. Does it make sense to group 3
bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted
users have access to 1)? More? Less?

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