- tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

[GSoC] Tails Server - status report 5
by segfault 17 Jul '16

17 Jul '16

Hi everyone, this is the fifth status report on the Tails Server GSoC project. I did two batches of user tests in the last two weeks, with five participants each. The results were mixed, more skilled users had a better user experience than less skilled users. I will try to solve the problems discovered and make it more user-friendly for less skilled users. You can read my reports and the following discussions on the Tails-UX mailinglist [1]. [1] https://mailman.boum.org/pipermail/tails-ux/2016-July/thread.html Other things I did in the last two weeks: - Fix and improve the "clickable label"-widget I implemented - Implement the autostart feature - Write documentation - Make the application translatable - Refactor the code - Fix several bugs You can still download nightly images from here [2], but the recent images don't include the latest changes yet. They will be included in the next few days. Cheers!

1 0

[GSoC16] Expand Nyx - Status Report 4
by Sambuddha Basu 16 Jul '16

16 Jul '16

Hi everyone, This is the fourth report for the 'Expand Nyx' project for GSoC 2016. I have been working on the following things since the past 2 weeks: * Added the history validation for the interpreter panel. * Added the tab completion for the interpreter panel. * Rebased code to include recent changes made by Damian. * Added some tests for the interpreter panel. The interpreter panel code ca be seen at: https://github.com/sammyshj/nyx/pull/12 In the next weeks, I will be adding rest of the tests for the interpreter panel and then start work on getting additional information provided by Onionoo. Hope everyone has a fun weekend! Thanks, Sambuddha

1 0

[GSOC16] Fingerprint Central - Status report n°4
by Pierre Laperdrix 16 Jul '16

16 Jul '16

Hi everyone, Here is my fourth status report for my GSOC project. https://github.com/plaperdr/fp-central 1 - The beta for FP Central is live! You can visit it at this address: https://fpcentral.irisa.fr/ Don't hesitate to send us feedback so that we can improve the website to make it the best we can! I'm already fixing and tweaking several things on my end. Right now, I'm updating the website once a week so don't hesitate to come back to see newly added features! 2 - I've added two statistics pages on the website. I'm still tweaking how the data is being shown to the user but the goal is that anyone can select the attributes they are interested in and get the distribution for a given time period. I'm planning on adding new ways to visualize and download data so that developers can easily get access to what they want. My goal for the next two weeks is to improve the statistics page so that it works well and add support of TBB versions. I'll also make sure that only TBB fingerprints are stored in the database so that the current stats are not polluted by other browsers. Have a great week-end, Pierre

1 0

[GSOC 16] Ahmia status update #4
by Ismael R 15 Jul '16

15 Jul '16

Hi everyone, I'm working on ahmia.fi, the hidden service search engine and you're reading status update #4. The django part rewrite detailled in report #3 is nearly done. Next step is to synchronize the work done on crawler and index with the django app. I also want to add more tests and documentation. Because we are not storing hidden service information on SQL anymore, the main challenge will be to rethink how to get statistics from index. I will write about this in a later report, but I think it is doable with elasticsearch's metrics aggregation. A lot of code has been removed from the project (be it deprecated, duplicated, doable with django framework, or by elasticsearch). I think the project is going to be easier to improve, and the barrier to start being a contributor will be lower. Changes are not yet available upstream because the other projects (crawler and index) need work as well. This is what the other contributors and I are going to do during the next two weeks. See you in two weeks :) Ismael

1 0

[GSoC] CONIKS for Tor Messenger - status report #4
by Huy Vu Quoc 15 Jul '16

15 Jul '16

Hi guys, These are things that I have been doing in the last two weeks: 1. Continue implementing the libmerkletree library. The next module of the lib is a storage backend. The implementation is at [1]. Below is a brief description of my implementation: - In each update, both tree version and STR are entirely stored to the db. (this idea is mostly from Coname authors) - The developers now can construct the tree from db or do lookup in the STR which is stored in the persistent storage. The idea is when the server has been restarted, the developers can initialize the in-memory PAD (the history hash chain) with an existing tree; or whenever the developers needs to do a lookup from the db instead of the in-memory STR (the length of the history hash chain is limited by server’s configuration). 2. Implement the key lookup protocol. This function is not finished yet, since I’m still working on the client. The source code for the server is at [2]. For the client, since we are signing the STR using Ed25519 signature scheme, the client also needs a library for verifying the signature efficiently. I’m working on a C library that makes use of libgcrypt library (which also be used currently by libotr library). It takes me time to learn how to use libgrcrypt library. When this C library is finished, I can start working on key lookup and monitoring functions on the client part. In the next two weeks, I will try to have a working prototype (both key registration and key lookup) for Tor Messenger. Then I and my mentors can focus on refactoring and optimizing source code, as well as writing tests. Best, Huy — [1] https://github.com/coniks-sys/libmerkleprefixtree-go/tree/db [2] https://github.com/coniks-sys/libconiks-server-go/tree/lookup

1 0

[GSoC 2016] Orfox - Report 4
by Amogh Pradeep 15 Jul '16

15 Jul '16

Hey guys, These are the things that I’ve done in the past couple of weeks. 1) More progress with nsXREDirProvider. We had some build issues with the nsXREDirProvider. [0] Turns out that it was introduced due to an old patch that was included during the rebase. We’ve shifted to the right version but looks like that still breaks the apk. I’m currently working on isolating the tbb teams patch that breaks the mobile app and hope to have a fix for it soon. 2) Upstreaming to the official tor-browser repo. We plan to merge all the android specific patches into the tor-browser repo. In order to track this, we have a ticket. [1] With this in mind, I have started to organize the Orfox patches to make it easier to keep track of them in the future. 3) Official Builds soon! n8fr8 tells me that the official build systems are close to being ready to produce a build. This means that we should see an update soon on F-Droid and eventually the Play store! 4) Changes with Netcipher. Now that we have a stable build going, we’re looking into how we’re going to maintain NetCipher which is used in Orfox. Once we have this figured out, we can move on to working on improving the functionality of Orfox with Netcipher. Thats all for now. I will be at PETS in Darmstrad next week, if anyone wants to discuss something Orfox, you can find me there! Best, Amogh Pradeep amoghbl1(a)gmail.com [0] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19532 [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19675

1 0

GreatFire Circumvention Central: tests of speed and stability of circumvention tools in China
by David Fifield 13 Jul '16

13 Jul '16

https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2016/jul/greatfireorg-now-testing-vpn-speed-a… https://cc.greatfire.org/en "Our newest website, Circumvention Central (CC), aims to provide real-time information and data about circumvention solutions that work in China. Since 2011, we have been collecting data about blocked websites in China and now we will add data about the effectiveness of VPNs and other circumvention tools." They list various VPNs and other tools. Tor is on the list. (This page has JavaScript charts that aren't working for me in Tor Browser.) https://cc.greatfire.org/en/provider/Tor At the moment, these are the figures I see: Speed (kbps) Stability 1. HideMyAss 504 (+39%) 98% (-1%) 2. VyprVPN 445 (−33%) 98% (+11%) 3. FreeBrowser 440 (+13%) 88% (+1%) 4. XX-Net 356 (New) 97% 5. Astrill 294 (−32%) 97% (+1%) 6. Lantern 262 (+15%) 95% (+3%) 7. VPNSecure 259 (New) 87% 8. Psiphon 218 (+6%) 89% (+2%) 9. Ultrasurf 206 (+460%) 86% (−4%) 10. Freegate 188 (−29%) 91% (+1%) 11. PureVPN 151 (−25%) 94% (+1%) 12. Tor 112 (+237%) 96% (+1%) The test details have interesting values under the "Settings" header: https://cc.greatfire.org/en/provider/Tor#http-tests "0", "socks5", "是", "lantern-proxy", "lantern-proxy,no bridge", "lantern-proxy,meek-arzue", "proxy,no bridge", "lantern-proxy,obfs4", "obfs4", "否", "meek-arzue", "obfs4,sock5 proxy". There's a tool on the list I didn't know, XX-Net. Its GitHub page says "It uses google app engine (GAE) as a proxy server through the firewall" and "A Reborn GoAgent." https://github.com/XX-net/XX-Net

1 0

BSc Honor Track Research Topic
by Bram van den Heuvel 12 Jul '16

12 Jul '16

Dear all, I'm currently an undergraduate student double BSc Applied Mathematics/Computer Science. This year I'll be doing a small (~500 hour) research project as part of my Honor track. I'm looking for a suitable research question I can try to answer, preferrably by using mathematical modeling. To give you an idea what kind of research I was planning to do, I briefly described my current idea below. I was considering researching path selection, specifically the probability of selecting only faulty/malicious nodes and how this might be improved by including an extra reputation metric. This hypothetical reputation metric would be a "social" like reputation, based on for example real-world connections between people. In the most extreme case, one could choose a path of which all nodes are ran by real-world trusted people. As there might be a more usefull research question out there, I was wondering whether there are any questions that the Tor Project has that might be answered by using mathematical modelling. I could then consider to try and answer this question in my research project. Thanks in advance.

1 0

Re: [tor-dev] Using Tor Stealth HS with a home automation server
by Nathan Freitas 10 Jul '16

10 Jul '16

On Fri, Jul 8, 2016, at 10:38 PM, bancfc(a)openmailbox.org wrote: > On 2016-07-08 18:53, Nathan Freitas wrote: > > I've been working on some ideas about using Tor to secure "internet of > > things", smart devices other than phones, and other home / industrial > > automation infrastructure. Specifically, I think this could be a huge > > application for Tor Hidden Services and Onion sites configured with > > Hidden Service Authentication and "stealth" mode. > > > > Earlier this year, I published some ideas on the subject here > > https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Internet%20of%20Oni… > > showing how you could use Orbot and IP Camera apps to build a > > cloud-free > > Tor-secured "Dropcam" style setup. > > > > Nice! An interesting Orbot feature to have is making QR Codes of > authenticated Hidden Service info so mobile devices can easily add each > other to a trusted network. That is a great idea. I am thinking of writing a module for the Home Assistant platform that would handle the tor install and setup, and it could autogenerate this QRcode as well. Any thoughts on a format? torhs://clientname:authcookie@foo.onion looks decent.

4 3

Using Tor Stealth HS with a home automation server
by Nathan Freitas 09 Jul '16

09 Jul '16

I've been working on some ideas about using Tor to secure "internet of things", smart devices other than phones, and other home / industrial automation infrastructure. Specifically, I think this could be a huge application for Tor Hidden Services and Onion sites configured with Hidden Service Authentication and "stealth" mode. Earlier this year, I published some ideas on the subject here https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Internet%20of%20Oni… showing how you could use Orbot and IP Camera apps to build a cloud-free Tor-secured "Dropcam" style setup. Now, I've taken the first step to setup my own instance of Home Assistant "an open-source home automation platform running on Python 3. Track and control all devices at home and automate control. Installation in less than a minute." Instructions on this are below. It all seems to be working well, but I would love any feedback, comments, thoughts that you might have. I would also like to ensure that any work on next-gen HS designs includes these kinds of use-cases. *** Pull request for the new "Tor cookbook" example for Home Assistant: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/627 *** Tor Onion Service Configuration This is an example about how you can configure Tor to provide secure remote access to your home assitance instance as an Onion site, through Tor’s Hidden Service feature. With this enabled, you do not need to open your firewall ports or setup HTTPS to enable secure remote access. This is useful if you want to have: Access your HA instance remotely without opening a firewall port or setting up a VPN Don’t want to or know how to get an SSL/TLS certificate and HTTPS configuration setup Want to block attackers from even being able to access/scan your port and server at all Want to block anyone from knowing your home IP address and seeing your traffic to your HA Background and Contact This configuration is part of an effort to apply strong cryptography technologies (like Onion Routing and End-to-End Encryption) to technology we increasingly depend on in our day to day lives. Just like when WhatsApp enabled end-to-end encryption messaging for everyone, every home automation and IoT platform should do the same, because A) the technology is all there, freely licensed and open-source and B) up to this point, all the commercial manufacturers have been doing a horrific job with security. You can learn more about how Tor can be used to secure home automation and IoT platforms through this short set of slides on the Internet of Onion Things This configuration was provided by @n8fr8 (github, twitter) of Guardian Project and Tor Project. You can send questions, feedback and ideas to support(a)guardianproject.info. Hidden Services and Onion Sites Tor allows clients and relays to offer hidden services. That is, you can offer a web server, SSH server, etc., without revealing your IP address to its users. In fact, because you don’t use any public address, you can run a hidden service from behind your firewall. Learn more about Hidden Services on the Tor Project website. Onion sites are websites that run on a Tor Hidden Service node. “dot onion” sites are an IETF recognized special use domain name. Setting up Tor on your Home Assistant First, install Tor. On a Debain-based system, you can install the package easily: > sudo apt-get install tor You can find more instructions for downloading and installing Tor on other platforms on the Tor Project Download Page. Next, modify Tor’s main configuration file /etc/tor/torrc to include the following lines: ... HiddenServiceDir /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/ HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:8123 HiddenServiceAuthorizeClient stealth haremote1 ... The “sleath” entry above ensures traffic to and from your HA instance over Tor, is hidden even from other nodes on the Tor network. The “haremote1” value is a generic client name entry that you can modify as you please. Then, restart Tor: >/etc/init.d/tor restart Then read the new generated authentication cookie from the Tor-generated hostname file: > sudo more /var/lib/tor/homeassistant/hostname The output of that command should look something like this, but with your own unique “dot onion” domain and authentication cookie: abcdef1234567890.onion ABCDEF1122334455667789 # client: haremote1 You are now done with the HA Tor server configuration. Make sure your HA instance is running, and now you can move to client configuration. Tor Client Access Setup Using this setup, you can access your HA instance over Tor from your laptop or mobile device, using Tor Browser and other software. Add the authentication cookie to your torrc client configuration on your laptop or mobile device. Using the sample values from above, it would look like this: HidServAuth abcdef1234567890.onion ABCDEF1122334455667789 For Tor Browser on Windows, Mac or Linux, you can find the torrc file here: <tor browser install directory>/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Tor/torrc-defaults Once you have added the entry, restart the browser, and then browse to the “dot onion” site address to connect to your HA instance. For Orbot: Tor on Android, add it in Orbot->Menu->Settings to the “Torrc Custom Config” entry. Restart Orbot, and then use the Orfox browser app, and browse to the “dot onion” site name to access your HA instance. You can also use Orbot’s VPN mode, to enable Tor access from any application on your device, such as Tasker or Owntracks. On iOS, we have not fully tested this yet, but you should be able to add custom torrc entries on Onion Browser, Red Onion or TOBY browsers, all available in the iTunes App Store. Some More Advanced Ideas With this configuration, only you can access your HA instance Onion site through Tor, and no one else. You can share the authentication cookie with multiple devices and users, or you can generate a unique one for each - up to you! If you have multiple, say for an industrial, business or corporate configuration, this would provide an easy way to revoke access to a specific user or device. If you always access your HA instance via Tor, you can easily run this on an isolated “IoT” network segment at your install site, keeping your internal home network traffic seperate from any potentially compromised devices (like cheap “smart” lightbulbs with backdoors!). You could also use Tor as a means to connect your HA instance to a remote device, sensor or other service that you do not want to or connect provide a direct, open IP connection to. Again, Tor provides authenticated and confidential routing (aka “privacy and encryption”) by default, without having to setup TLS/SSL or VPN. It is just important to secure IoT nodes within your network, as it is to secure remote access! As mentioned, with Orbot on Android, you can enable a “full device” VPN mode, that allows any app you have to tunnel through Tor, even if it is not Tor or proxy aware. This means you should be able to enter your “dot onion” Onion site address into any app you want to access to your HA instance, and it should work.

2 1