- anti-censorship-team - lists.torproject.org

New censorship event, in Belarus. No way to add it
by kuroneko＠dismail.de 12 Aug '20

12 Aug '20

Belarus has been experiencing serious internet connectivity issues for 3 days already. I tried to add a new censorship event to <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MetricsTimeline>, but the wiki has been rendered read-only. See also: https://twitter.com/KuroNeko10x/status/1293035387468648450. Is there any other way to add a new censorship event to metrics.torproject.org at the moment? -- kuroneko / KuroNeko / 黒ネコ https://twitter.com/KuroNeko10x

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Next week's reading group: Adoption and Abandonment of VPNs
by Cecylia Bocovich 23 Jul '20

23 Jul '20

Hey everyone! Our next anti-censorship reading group will take place on July 23 at the end of our usual meeting at 16:00 UTC. The reading next week is a new paper being presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) this week titled: "Emotional and Practical Considerations Towards the Adoption and Abandonment of VPNs as a Privacy-Enhancing Technology" Link to the paper: https://petsymposium.org/2020/files/papers/issue1/popets-2020-0006.pdf This talk will be live streamed tomorrow (Thursday) July 16th in the censorship session that runs from 12:40–13:55 ET (16:40-17:55 UTC) at the following link (along with some other talks that may be interesting to this group): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdDgAuuilZk Cecylia

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How do wiki pages work in the new gitlab?
by David Fifield 24 Jun '20

24 Jun '20

Were wiki pages from Trac copied over to gitlab somewhere? I have found "Wiki" links on some gitlab pages, but not mirrored content from Trac. The page I care about is https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MetricsTimeline which is used for the timeline annotations under Tor Metrics graphs. Even if wiki content was not automatically copied over, I'm thinking of giving that page a new home on gitlab.

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Next week's reading group: V2Ray & VMess
by David Fifield 11 Jun '20

11 Jun '20

The topic of the reading group next week will be V2Ray and VMess. The reading group happens after the weekly team IRC meeting, which will be at 16:00 UTC on Thursday, 2020-06-11. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam#… V2Ray is a platform for deploying proxy protocols. It offers a number of composable proxy protocols, transports, and obfuscation options. https://www.v2ray.com/en/ https://github.com/v2ray/v2ray-core VMess is one of the proxy protocols supported by V2Ray. From my cursory understanding, it is in a similar vein to protocols like obfs4 and Shadowsocks. https://github.com/v2ray/manual/blob/master/eng_en/protocols/vmess.md I started a discussion thread, hoping to attract comments from people who are familiar with V2Ray and know the state of the art. https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/36 There is a beginner's guide to setting up V2Ray: https://guide.v2fly.org/en_US/

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Request for comments: Generalising BridgeDB
by Philipp Winter 09 Jun '20

09 Jun '20

We have been struggling with maintaining GetTor and BridgeDB because both projects have accumulated a considerable amount of technical debt. Besides, they implement similar tasks (generally speaking, they distribute resources to users), which means that we are maintaining redundant code. Given these issues, we have been thinking about generalising and merging GetTor's and BridgeDB's architecture. That could mean 1) turning GetTor into a BridgeDB distributor or 2) building a new system. The rest of this email discusses the latter option. Below is a diagram that proposes a design. On the left side, we have scripts and tools that take as input resources (e.g., bridge descriptors, Tor Browser download links, or even HTTPS or Snowflake proxy information) and write them to our resource DB. On the right side, we have several distributors (e.g., our existing Email/HTTPS/Moat distributors, but possibly also a Salmon, GetTor, or wolpertinger, our "hand bridges to OONI" distributor). In the middle sits the Matchmaker, which receives requests from distributors and answers them with data from our resource DB. ┌───────┐ │User DB│ ┌───────────┐ └───┬───┘ │Bridge desc├──┐ ┌─────┴─────┐ │ parser │ │ ┌─┤Salmon dist│ └───────────┘ │ │ └───────────┘ ┌────────────┐ │┌───────────┐ ┌──────────┐ │ ┌─────────┐ │Tor Browser ├─┼┤Resource DB├─ SQL─┤Matchmaker├ TCP ┼─┤Moat dist│ │link scraper│ │└───────────┘ └──────────┘ │ └─────────┘ └────────────┘ │ │ ┌───────────┐ ┌────────────┐ │ └─┤GetTor dist│ │Snowflake or├─┘ └───────────┘ │https proxy?│ └────────────┘ Cecylia suggested that all (or some) of these components can live in separate processes. That has the following advantages: * The system becomes easier to maintain and test. * We can build distributors in different languages. * A failing distributor doesn't affect the rest of the system. * A distributor doesn't have direct access to our database. For now, let's assume that distributors talk to the Matchmaker over TCP and use a protocol like JSON, gob, or protobufs. When a distributor asks the Matchmaker for a resource, it provides the following information: * The resource type (e.g., an obfs4 bridge) * A client-specific ID (e.g., its IP address) * The client's location (e.g., Russia) The Matchmaker then responds with one or more resources, similar to how BridgeDB currently does it. If any of these resources go offline at some point, the Matchmaker should notify the distributor so it can react accordingly. I would love to hear your thoughts on the above, even if it's far from comprehensive. Do you think that the above design sketch accommodates our present and foreseeable future needs? Cheers, Philipp

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ftp file transfers have no protocol headers?
by Roger Dingledine 03 Jun '20

03 Jun '20

Hi folks, I was trying to help a user in #tor to get their ftp server running behind an onion, and rediscovering the ftp protocol's weird separation between the control channel and the file transfer channels, and I realized it could be interesting in the obfs4 / "unclassifiable protocols" context. To recap, when you ftp a file, you connect to port 21, and tell it you want to download a file. In the modern era, clients and servers use "passive mode" by default, where the server opens a high-numbered port, and you connect to that port and it dumps the file on you. I might be mistaken (please tell me if I am), but I believe there are no protocol headers or preamble or handshake or anything to the download. You just connect and the bytes start flowing. If this is so, and if ftp were still popular, then there are a bunch of high-numbered-port connections which will be hard to classify by protocol because they are simply a file, on the network. Of course, many files have structure of their own, including some "header"-like preface that e.g. says it's a zip file. By that reasoning, a variant of obfsproxy that wrapped Tor traffic to look like a password-protected zip file could give it many other things to blend with on a large network like China's backbone. (Compression is good but not enough, because DPI engines already know how to uncompress a zipped flow to look inside it. So we need some sort of encryption or password or the like too.) By that reasoning also, it might be interesting to separate the two directional flows in an obfs connection -- i.e. so there's a "download" flow, and a separate "upload" flow. This approach will surely look weird in some contexts (two flows rather than one, and no ftp control connection, gotcha), but maybe in other contexts it will have many friends -- I'm thinking network backbones where there are many flows, many users are natted, and it's expensive to try to tie together state between permutations of flows. If you google for 'why is ftp still used' you find a bunch of articles lamenting that people won't move away from it, and especially that large orgs won't move away from it. Maybe some of those large orgs are reasoning that if they secure the files contents themselves, then the transfer protocol doesn't matter so much. That scenario would play well into our goals of having a bunch of high-entropy files being passed around with no protocol headers. Hm, --Roger

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Plans for BridgeDB's future
by Philipp Winter 14 May '20

14 May '20

This email introduces our plans for BridgeDB's future. I attached a diagram that illustrates how these plans integrate into BridgeDB's existing design. Red components in the diagram (Salmon, bridgestrap, and wolpertinger) are new, and in the process of being built. I introduce these components below. The Salmon social distributor --------------------------------- A PETS'16 paper introduced the Salmon social proxy distributor: <https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Douglas2016a> In a nutshell, Salmon hands out bridges to users while maintaining per-user reputation scores. Alice's reputation goes up if her bridge remains unblocked after she got it, and it goes down if the bridge is blocked after Alice got it. Users can invite each other, which results in an invitation graph. Eventually, we will hopefully have a Salmon distributor which will live alongside our Moat, HTTPS, and Email distributors. If this interests you, consider attending our anti-censorship meeting on May 14 because we will be discussing the Salmon paper as part of our reading group: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam#…> We are only just starting to think about Salmon, so I have no code or design to share at this point. All that matters for now is that Salmon needs to know where bridges are blocked. BridgeDB does not have this information but the following software components seek to fix that. Bridgestrap ----------- Bridgestrap exposes an API that takes as input a bridge line and responds by telling you if it could establish a Tor circuit over the given bridge. BridgeDB will check with bridgestrap if the bridges it's about to hand out actually work. This isn't always the case as the following ticket shows: <https://bugs.torproject.org/30441> We have a working prototype of bridgestrap: <https://gitlab.torproject.org/phw/bridgestrap> We coordinate development in this ticket: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31874> Wolpertinger ------------ Wolpertinger exposes an API that lets censorship measurement platforms like OONI request bridges to measure. Wolpertinger later fetches OONI's test results and feeds them back into BridgeDB's bridge database. This allows BridgeDB to take into account a user's location when distributing bridges: a user in Turkey won't be given bridges that are known to be blocked in Turkey. In addition to OONI, we could repurpose bridgestrap as another censorship measurement tool by setting it up on a VPS in, say, Turkey and have wolpertinger periodically feed it bridges to test. Wolpertinger is work in progress but we already have some code: <https://gitlab.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/wolpertinger> We coordinate development in this ticket: <https://bugs.torproject.org/32740> A practical example ------------------- To illustrate how these pieces fit together, let us consider the example in the attached diagram. Imagine that the bridge 1.2.3.4:1234 was just set up and reported itself to Serge, our bridge authority. Serge syncs its bridge descriptors to BridgeDB every 30 minutes and BridgeDB reloads those descriptors every 30 minutes, so it takes a maximum of 60 minutes until BridgeDB knows about this new bridge. Now, a user from Turkey requests a bridge over HTTPS. Since BridgeDB sees the user's IP address, it knows that the request is coming from Turkey. First, BridgeDB will ask a local instance of bridgestrap if the bridge it intends to hand to the user is working. This is important because the only testing we currently have in place is done by the bridge authority, which makes sure that a bridge's OR port is reachable. Nothing is testing a bridge's obfs4 port, which means that a user may end up with a bridge whose obfs4 port is firewalled. Bridgestrap can tell BridgeDB if a bridge is functional but it doesn't know if the bridge is blocked in Turkey. This is where wolpertinger comes in. Wolpertinger works in an asynchronous manner to BridgeDB and 1) hands out bridges to OONI probes, 2) collects OONI's test results, and 3) writes these results back to BridgeDB's bridge database, allowing BridgeDB to learn if a given bridge is blocked in Turkey. If everything works out, our user will receive bridges that are functional and unblocked in Turkey. Please let me know if you have questions or feedback. Cheers, Philipp

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Merging bridgedb and gettor?
by Roger Dingledine 14 May '20

14 May '20

Hi folks! I've been pondering our two tools, gettor and bridgedb, and realizing that conceptually they overlap in a bunch of ways. Does that mean, while Cecylia is exploring getting gettor back on its feet, we should make them overlap more in a technical sense too? Some initial thoughts: + Having fewer tools to maintain is an obvious win, in terms of fewer moving pieces, fewer things to explain to people, less mental energy. + Broadly speaking, they are both tools that want to support a variety of low bandwidth "access methods" for reaching them, and they use these access methods to tell users about "resources". - They have different threat models in terms of how they want to protect the resources they give out, which makes them have different preferences about which access methods will work best. + But they both have a notion of "these resources aren't suitable for giving to people in this location", that is, they both want to learn something about *where* the user will be trying to apply the resource, and they both want to pull in some external "constraints" data set. + And being able to reuse (share) access methods could still be a win. For example, if Gettor learns how to answer people over Telegram, then it becomes much easier for BridgeDB to experiment with answering people over Telegram. + The monitoring tools ("is it working, am I getting answers, are the resources it gives me appropriate") overlap a lot between the two. - They have different text they want to use when interacting with users, and maybe different ways of handling errors. So those differences won't go away. = There are external tasks that gettor wants to do, such as pushing Tor Browser to the various websites that make up the resources we return. But just as BridgeDB is growing external modules like Wolpertinger, it's reasonable that GetTor could have external modules that publish/mirror our packages to various sites. ? Is there a third thing that Tor wants to do, of the form "use this access method to give people this resource"? Generalizing from three would be even better than generalizing from two. Please use this initial brainstorming as a starting point and take this thread wherever it should best go. For example, maybe they should be two different front-ends and as much functionality as possible would be merged into a library that they both use. Or maybe gettor is essentially a smaller "lift" so it should become a module of what bridgedb does. Several options here. --Roger

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Tor Project removed a ticket about censorship
by wtfareyouthinking＠secmail.pro 14 May '20

14 May '20

What the F are you thinking, Tor Project? Why did you delete ticket #24351 and some documents instead of locking it? And why I can't make a comment or create a ticket on trac.torproject.org about this? You're developing Tor and telling people to resist censorship yet you've helped spammer to achieve their objective - deface anti-Cloudflare related documents/tickets. I really don't understand why you did this. I suggest you restore ticket #24351 and lock it.

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Weekly team meetings now at 16:00 UTC
by Philipp Winter 11 May '20

11 May '20

Hi all, >From now on, anti-censorship team meetings will start at 16:00 UTC instead of 18:00 UTC. See you all on Thursday, 16:00 UTC in #tor-meeting! I updated our meeting pad, our team wiki page, and our Google calendar. Cheers, Philipp

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