August 2018 - tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

the consequences of deprecating debian alpha repos with every new major branch
by nusenu 21 Dec '21

21 Dec '21

Hi, tldr: - more outdated relays (that is a claim I'm making and you could easily proof me wrong by recreating the 0.3.3.x alpha repos and ship 0.3.3.7 in them and see how things evolve after a week or so) - more work for the tpo website maintainer - less happy relay operators [3][4] - more work for repo maintainers? (since a new repo needs to be created) When the tor 0.3.4 alpha repos (deb.torproject.org) first appeared on 2018-05-23 I was about to submit a PR for the website to include … [View More]it in the sources.list generator [1] on tpo but didn't do it because I wanted to wait for a previous PR to be merged first. The outstanding PR got merged eventually (2018-06-28) but I still did not submit a PR to update the repo generator for 0.3.4.x nonetheless and here is why. Recently I was wondering why are there so many relays running tor version 0.3.3.5-rc? (see OrNetStats or Relay Search) (> 3.2% CW fraction) Then I realized that this was the last version the tor-experimental-0.3.3.x-* repos were shipping before they got abandoned due to the new 0.3.4.x-* repos (I can no longer verify it since they got removed by now). Peter made it clear in the past that the current way to have per-major-version debian alpha repos (i.e. tor-experimental-0.3.4.x-jessie) will not change [2]: > If you can't be bothered to change your sources.list once or twice a > year, then you probably should be running stable. but maybe someone else would be willing to invoke a "ln" commands everytime a new new alpha repo is born. tor-alpha-jessie -> tor-experimental-0.3.4.x-jessie once 0.3.5.x repos are created the link would point to tor-alpha-jessie -> tor-experimental-0.3.5.x-jessie It is my opinion that this will help reduce the amount of relays running outdated versions of tor. It will certainly avoid having to update the tpo website, which isn't a big task and could probably be automated but it isn't done currently. "..but that would cause relay operators to jump from i.e. 0.3.3.x to 0.3.4.x alphas (and break setups)!" Yes, and I think that is better than relays stuck on an older version because the former repo no longer exists and operators still can choose the old repos which will not jump to newer major versions. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/debian.html.en#ubuntu [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14997#comment:3 [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-June/015549.html [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26474 -- https://twitter.com/nusenu_ https://mastodon.social/@nusenu [View Less]

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DNS-over-HTTPS (DOH) in Firefox/Torbrowser
by nusenu 01 Jul '20

01 Jul '20

Hi, since Mozilla did tests [0] on DOH [1] in Firefox I was wondering if Torbrowser developers have put any thought into that as well? Note: I'm _not_ suggesting to use DOH in torbrowser I'm just asking because the answer probably matters for exit documentation in the relay guide if clients do DNS themselves over TCP connections instead of relying on the exit (even if torbrowser is not the only tor client). thanks, nusenu [0] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and-… [View More]

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Lets give every circuit its own exit IP?
by nusenu 18 Mar '20

18 Mar '20

The unbearable situation with Google's reCAPTCHA motivated this email (but it is not limited to this specific case). This idea came up when seeing a similar functionality in unbound (which has it for a different reason). Assumption: There are systems that block some tor exit IP addresses (most likely the bigger once), but they are not blocked due to the fact that they are tor exits. It just occurred that the IP got flagged because of "automated / malicious" requests and IP reputation … [View More]

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Bandwidth scanner: request for feedback
by teor 20 Nov '18

20 Nov '18

Hi, Juga and pastly have been working hard on sbws. Sbws' results are now similar to torflow's results: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/27135/20180826_0… Now that sbws is close to torflow, we want some feedback on its design. We’ll work on the design at the tor meeting in September. Please feel free to give feedback by email, or on the tickets: What happens when sbws doesn't match torflow? https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/27339 We suggest this … [View More]

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UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header
by George Kadianakis 26 Oct '18

26 Oct '18

UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header ======================================================================== 1. Motivation: Lots of high-profile websites have onion addresses these days (e.g. Tor , NYT, blockchain, ProPublica). All those websites seem confused on what's the right way to inform their users about their onion addresses. Here are some confusion examples: a) torproject.org does not even advertise their onion address to Tor … [View More]users (!!!) b) blockchain.info throws an ugly ASCII page to Tor users mentioning their onion address and completely wrecking the UX (loses URL params, etc.) c) ProPublica has a "Browse via Tor" section which redirects to the onion site. Ideally there would be a consistent way for websites to inform their users about their onion counterpart. This would provide the following positives: + Tor users would use onions more often. That's important for user education and user perception, and also to partially dispell the darkweb myth. + Website operators wouldn't have to come up with ad-hoc ways to advertise their onion services, which sometimes results in complete breakage of the user experience (particularly with blockchain) This proposal specifies a simple way forward here that's far from perfect, but can still provide benefits and also improve user-education around onions so that in the future we could employ more advanced techniques. Also see Tor ticket #21952 for more discussion on this: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952 2. Proposal Websites use the Alt-Svc HTTP header to specify their onion counterpart: http://httpwg.org/http-extensions/alt-svc.html The Tor Browser intercepts that header (if any) and auto-redirects the user to the onion site. Tor Browser only does so if the header is served over HTTPS. (That's it.) 3. Improvements 3.1. User education through notifications To minimize the probability of users freaking out about auto-redirects Tor Browser could inform the user that the auto-redirect is happening. This could happen with a small notification bar [*] below the URL bar informing users that "Tor Browser is auto-redirecting you to the secure onion site". The notification bar could also have a question mark button that provides the user with additional information on the merits of onion sites and why they should like them. [*]: like this one: http://www.topdreamweaverextensions.com/UserFiles/Image/firefox-bar.jpg 3.2. Auto-redirects too intrusive? Make them optional. If we think that auto redirects are too intrusive, we should consider making them optional, or letting the website specify the desired behavior. If a website wants to specify an onion address but doesn't like auto-redirects, it could specify that as part of Alt-Svc and we could still inform the user that an onion is available using a notification bar again. 4. Drawbacks This proposal is far from the perfect solution of course. Here are a few reasons why: 4.1. Auto-redirects are scary Novice users or paranoid users might freak out with auto-redirects since it's unexpected. They might think they are under attack or they got hacked. An argument against that is that we are already using HTTPS-everywhere which is basically a redirection layer, and while its redirection technique is simpler, sometimes the derivative URL is not similar to the original URL, and we still don't see people freaking out. I think that's because people trust Tor Browser to do the right thing. Combining this knowledge with section 3.1 might solve this problem. 4.2. No security/performance benefits While we could come up with auto-redirect proposals that provide security and performance benefits, this proposal does not actually provide any of those. As a matter of fact, the security remains the same as connecting to normal websites (since we trust its HTTP headers), and the performance gets worse since we first need to connect to the website, get its headers, and then also connect to the onion. Still _all_ the website approaches mentioned in the "Motivation" section suffer from the above drawbacks, and sysadmins still come up with ad-hoc ways to inform users abou their onions. So this simple proposal will still help those websites and also pave the way forward for future auto-redirect techniques. 4.3. Alt-Svc does not do exactly what we want I read in a blog post [*] that using Alt-Svc header "doesn’t change the URL in the location bar, document.location or any other indication of where the resource is; this is a “layer below” the URL.". IIUC, this is not exactly what we want because users will not notice the onion address, they will not get the user education part of the proposal and their connection will still be slowed down. I think we could perhaps change this in Tor Browser so that it rewrites the onion address to make it clear to people that they are now surfing the onionspace. [*]: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2016/03/09/alt-svc 5. The future As I said this is just a simple proposal to introduce the auto-redirect concept to people, and also to help some sysadmins who are currently coming up with weird ways to inform people about their onions. It's not the best way to do this, but it's definitely one of the simplest ways. In the future we could implement with more advanced auto-redirect proposals like: a) Have a "domains to onions" map into HTTPS-everywhere and have it do the autoredirects for us (performance benefits, and security benefits under many threat models). b) Bake onion addresses into SSL certificates and Let's Encrypt as suggested by comment:42 in #21952. But both of the designs above require non-trivial engineering/policy work and would still confuse people. So I think starting with a simple approach that will educate users and then moving to more advanced designs is a more normative way to go. ====================================================================== Let me know what you think :) (Should this be part of torspec?) [View Less]

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Upcoming changes to CSV files provided by Tor Metrics
by Karsten Loesing 14 Sep '18

14 Sep '18

Hello tor-dev@, today we finally published specifications [0] for the per-graph CSV files that we added to Tor Metrics earlier this year. At the same time we're announcing two upcoming changes to CSV files provided by Tor Metrics: - August 15: We're going to make the first batch of changes to per-graph CSV files marked as "Suggested change" on the linked page. If you're currently working with per-graph CSV files, you should watch out for those changes. We're tracking these changes on #26998 … [View More]

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Tor Volunteer
by ESAUL PARRA GARCIA 09 Sep '18

09 Sep '18

Hello everyone, I want to volunteer my time for the tor project. I have a background in statistics, python, R, and web development(react, nodejs, monbodb, aws, dynamob). Let me know what I can do to help. Email me back so I can send you my resume. Best, Esaul Parra Garcia -- University of California, Los Angeles B.S. Statistics | 2017 Email: epg323(a)ucla.edu | Mobile: 323.984.1204

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Archiving old Components in Trac
by teor 29 Aug '18

29 Aug '18

Hi, Is anyone still using these trac components? Applications/Tor Messenger Applications/Tor Mail Applications/TorBirdy Core Tor/Erebus Obfuscation/FTE If no-one is using them, we can move them to Archived/ T -- teor Please reply @torproject.org New subkeys 1 July 2018 PGP C855 6CED 5D90 A0C5 29F6 4D43 450C BA7F 968F 094B ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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oss-fuzz Coverage
by Tom Ritter 29 Aug '18

29 Aug '18

tor is in OSS-Fuzz, and I recently found this very slick dashboard that shows you just what coverage tor is getting out of it: https://storage.googleapis.com/oss-fuzz-coverage/tor/reports/20180829/linux… Thought I'd share in case others hadn't seen it (I think it's fairly new.) -tom

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Highlights from ACM SIGCOMM
by Iain Learmonth 27 Aug '18

27 Aug '18

Hi All, I attended ACM's SIGCOMM last week. A few things caught my attention that I thought might be of interest here: "CircuitStart: A Slow Start For Multi-Hop Anonymity Systems" Christoph Döpmann and Florian Tschorsch. Link: https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N666917 "Design of SOCKS Version 6" Vladimir Olteanu and Dragoş Niculescu. Link: https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N666057 Related Internet Draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-olteanu-intarea-socks-6/ One thing about their design … [View More]

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