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Questions about "Tor Messenger CONIKS integration"
by Go 21 Apr '16

21 Apr '16

Hi, CONIKS seems to be a very useful system. Just curious: do Tor messenger users need to hand out their real identities (facebook account, twitter account, etc.) to CONIKS servers? If so it seems dangerous to put all the identities in a centralized service. If the CONIKS servers have been compromised, will the attacker be able to figure out the social networking profiles of Tor messenger users? Thanks!

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prop224: HSDir caches question with OOM
by David Goulet 20 Apr '16

20 Apr '16

Hi! (For the following, I'm only talking about HS directory.) Here is my conundrum. I was working on plugging the new cache for proposal 224 into our OOM. I stumbled upon a fun problem. We plan to have both current and new HS protocol in parallel. This means two caches for both version 2 (current) and 3 (prop224). So far so good. However, here is the problem. Now, our OOM handlers is called in: cell_queues_check_size(). The heuristic is basically: /* If we're spending over 20% of the memory limit on hidden service * descriptors, free them until we're down to 10%. */ Considering we have _two_ caches now, we somehow have to cleanup both of them "evenly" that is if we have to remove 20kb we either remove 10kb on each (if possible) or we actually clean them by entry expiry time instead regardless of which version. I think the latter is what we want but then it complicates things a bit since both cache contains _different_ data struct. and indexed with different keys (DIGEST vs DIGEST256). One option here is to go over all entries in both cache, create temporary objects and put them in a sorted list (by expiry time). Those "temp object" would contain something like: 1) cache version, 2) expiry time and 3) index key. Once done, we go over that list and delete entries until we reach our number of bytes we need to remove. This could work since we would do that when we are at 20% memory but still it requires allocating some small objects to _clear_ our memory... Someone has maybe something _better_ to propose? :) (keep in mind that minimal change to the current HS code is preferable. I know that unifying both caches somehow would help but that's lots more work! and the new cache for prop224 will be able to support versionning for which our current one doesn't, it's baked for v2.) I'm asking because this will require some refactoring for which I want to make sure we are in agreement on how to proceed and it doesn't end up not the right solution. Basically my goal is to move the OOM handler for both v2 and v3 to one single function called hs_cache_handle_oom() and from which we'll do the gymnastic describe above. We'll stop calling rend_cache_clean_v2_descs_as_dir() explicitely after that in cell_queues_check_size(). Cheers! David

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Comments on proposal 224 updates
by Nick Mathewson 19 Apr '16

19 Apr '16

I'm behind on this! But let me comment on the stuff that got merged recently. "prop224: Remove the MAINT_INTRO feature." "prop224: Clarify backwards compatibility sections slightly." "prop224: Clarify use of shared random values." "prop224: Fix undefined variables in the ntor section." Looks ok. "prop224: Add missing key expansion section for rendezvous crypto." KDF-Tor is a legacy algorithm, and we want to get away from SHA1. We don't use KDF-Tor with NTOR. Let's kill it for new use. I'd suggest HKDF-SHA256 or SHAKE, both of which we have implemented already. "prop224: In cells, replace TYPE/LEN/KEY with just TYPE/KEY." I'm not sure about this change. If we ever add a third key type, all of the cells will be unparseable. "prop224: Various improvements." There's no point in using HKDF with SHAKE; we should just use SHAKE as the KDF.

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Request for feedback/victims: cfc-0.0.3
by Yawning Angel 18 Apr '16

18 Apr '16

Thanks for the feedback/bug reports so far. [ PEOPLE THAT HAVE BIG SCARY ADVERSARIES IN THEIR THREAT MODEL STILL SHOULD NOT USE THIS. ] This is the third release of the archive.is based captcha-be-gone extension for Tor Browser. Relative to 0.0.2, this has a minor bugfix that fixes URLs with trendy "@" signs in odd places by replacing the URI/URL parser (Eg: "https://medium.com/@blahblahblah"). I've been busy with other things so this was the only change, but medium.com is popular enough that it deserved a new XPI. Source: https://git.schwanenlied.me/yawning/cfc XPI: https://people.torproject.org/~yawning/volatile/cfc-20160418/ Regards, -- Yawning Angel

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Re: [tor-dev] Latest state of the guard algorithm proposal (prop259) (April 2016)
by Fan Jiang 18 Apr '16

18 Apr '16

Hi, the last mail got rejected by tor-dev, to keep track of this thread, sending again, sorry for disturbing, > On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 5:37 AM, George Kadianakis <desnacked(a)riseup.net> > wrote: > >> Fan Jiang <fanjiang(a)thoughtworks.com> writes: >> >> > [ text/plain ] >> > Thanks for the insights. >> > >> > >> >> >> It seems like the latest version of prop259 was posted a few weeks >> ago: >> >> >> >> >> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010625.html >> >> >> >> >> > <snip> >> >> > >> >> >> A few things: >> >> >> >> >> >> a) Are there still proposal design decisions that need to be taken >> and >> >> we >> >> >> are >> >> >> unclear on? I admit I'm a bit lost in the latest [tor-dev] >> thread, so >> >> >> maybe >> >> >> I can be of help somehow here? >> >> >> >> >> >> There are still some issues, like for_directory may leads to >> maintain >> >> two >> >> > sets of >> >> > sampled_set independently, which is not yet defined clearly in >> proposal. >> >> > >> >> >> >> Hm, how come this is happening? >> >> >> >> I would think that for_directory would now be just another filter >> (like the >> >> ipv6 one etc.) that can be applied on top of the sampled list. >> >> >> > The problem here is for_directory is a parameter of function call, that >> > means we can't do filter >> > before the call happens. Now the filter action only happens at START >> stage. >> > Maybe do a check before we return the selected guard (if not valid, then >> > continue picking new one) >> > can be a solution. >> > >> >> Hello, >> >> hm, that's an interesting problem... >> >> So we learn whether a circuit is for_directory when >> choose_random_entry_prop259() is called, but at that point the prop259 >> algorithm has already STARTed and its filtering parameters have been >> determined? >> >> So if some part of tor calls choose_random_entry_prop259() quickly twice, >> first >> with for_directory set, and the second time with for_directory unset, the >> guard >> algorithm will proceed in both cases with for_directory being set? >> Because the >> context has been set in the first call to choose_random_entry_prop259()? >> >> This seems like a problem to me, and I'm not sure how to solve it well... >> >> One way could be to use the 'cpath_build_state_t *state' in >> choose_random_entry_prop259() to be able to understand whether each call >> is >> about a different circuit or not. Then you could start a separate >> algorithm >> invocation (so new START) for each new circuit you see. >> >> But then I'm not sure how to do this without each separate algorithm call >> wrecking up the sampled_guards and used_guards lists... In the dev >> meeting in >> Valencia, we discussed with Ola and Reinaldo about using locking and >> blocking >> for this, but I'm not sure how much that would impact the performance... >> >> Do you guys have any plans here? >> >> We can have two pending_guard one for directory, one for any usage(which > will be picked by the NEXT algo, so they can be same node), > and they can be checked with directory flag before return. > Locking may not work because this algo should at least return sth before > it continues to another one, saying Dir and non-Dir are now in main loop, > Or if you have any ideas please let me know. > >> --- >> >> >> >> BTW, I also noticed that you have various global structures in prop259.c, >> like >> entry_guard_selection and used_guards and sampled_guards. I see you've >> been >> working hard on un-globalizing the entry_guards list, but I'm not sure if >> there >> is value to that if all those other structures are global. Do you have >> plans >> for making those structures local to each specific algorithm instance? >> >> I've been working on moving these other structures into a > guard_selection_t, > and hope it can help to make this algo instanceable. > > >> Cheers! >> >

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putting 'Nuke MyFamily' to vote (#6676)
by nusenu 16 Apr '16

16 Apr '16

One year after my last thread on that topic [0] I'd like to move forward on the question whether tor should have a MyFamily functionality or not, because it seems to be a blocker of prop242 (#5565) and it is clear that the current MyFamily design is not practical for many - given the amount of improper or undeclared families [6]. prop 242 is also relevant in the context of Sibyls because if MyFamily becomes trivially easy for everyone to configure one might even start to use it to tell "good" and "bad" apart. If you have an opinion on that topic please reply. I tried to collect opinions on that from past threads and trac. When Nick asked "So, what do we think?" last year only people in favor of keeping it replied. In favor of keeping it: Nick [1] Teor [2] Virgil [3] Griffin [4] Moritz [5] In favor of nuking MyFamily: rransom anyone? Please speak up. Tools that use/display/process/depend on MyFamily: - tor-roster.org - onionoo - atlas - others? Can we close #6676 if no one is in favor of removing MyFamily? https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6676 [0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008516.html [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008517.html [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008531.html [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008527.html [4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-March/008529.html [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6676#comment:8 [6] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nusenu/tor-network-observations/master/to… https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ornetstats/stats/master/o/potentially_dan…

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Add me
by Ruth Watts 16 Apr '16

16 Apr '16

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Re: [tor-dev] Latest state of the guard algorithm proposal (prop259) (April 2016)
by George Kadianakis 15 Apr '16

15 Apr '16

Fan Jiang <fanjiang(a)thoughtworks.com> writes: > [ text/plain ] > Thanks for the insights. > > >> >> It seems like the latest version of prop259 was posted a few weeks ago: >> >> >> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010625.html >> >> >> > <snip> >> > >> >> A few things: >> >> >> >> a) Are there still proposal design decisions that need to be taken and >> we >> >> are >> >> unclear on? I admit I'm a bit lost in the latest [tor-dev] thread, so >> >> maybe >> >> I can be of help somehow here? >> >> >> >> There are still some issues, like for_directory may leads to maintain >> two >> > sets of >> > sampled_set independently, which is not yet defined clearly in proposal. >> > >> >> Hm, how come this is happening? >> >> I would think that for_directory would now be just another filter (like the >> ipv6 one etc.) that can be applied on top of the sampled list. >> > The problem here is for_directory is a parameter of function call, that > means we can't do filter > before the call happens. Now the filter action only happens at START stage. > Maybe do a check before we return the selected guard (if not valid, then > continue picking new one) > can be a solution. > Hello, hm, that's an interesting problem... So we learn whether a circuit is for_directory when choose_random_entry_prop259() is called, but at that point the prop259 algorithm has already STARTed and its filtering parameters have been determined? So if some part of tor calls choose_random_entry_prop259() quickly twice, first with for_directory set, and the second time with for_directory unset, the guard algorithm will proceed in both cases with for_directory being set? Because the context has been set in the first call to choose_random_entry_prop259()? This seems like a problem to me, and I'm not sure how to solve it well... One way could be to use the 'cpath_build_state_t *state' in choose_random_entry_prop259() to be able to understand whether each call is about a different circuit or not. Then you could start a separate algorithm invocation (so new START) for each new circuit you see. But then I'm not sure how to do this without each separate algorithm call wrecking up the sampled_guards and used_guards lists... In the dev meeting in Valencia, we discussed with Ola and Reinaldo about using locking and blocking for this, but I'm not sure how much that would impact the performance... Do you guys have any plans here? --- BTW, I also noticed that you have various global structures in prop259.c, like entry_guard_selection and used_guards and sampled_guards. I see you've been working hard on un-globalizing the entry_guards list, but I'm not sure if there is value to that if all those other structures are global. Do you have plans for making those structures local to each specific algorithm instance? Cheers!

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Proposal: Tor with collective signatures
by Nicolas Gailly 14 Apr '16

14 Apr '16

Hi Tor devs, I'm part of the DeDiS team at EPFL and we are working on Cothority, which is a generic framework for Collective Authority. We worked on a proposal to apply Collective Signatures (CoSi) to D.A. consensus document in the Tor ecosystem. While not adding too much complexity to the Tor ecosystem, we believe it can bring more transparency, accountability and security regarding the consensus documents. There is also a section regarding the emergency procedure that D.A.s operators are under when a relay is detected as malicious, and how CoSi could help in this process. I hope you will find it interesting and welcome all the feedbacks / opinions you can have! Thanks in advance, Nicolas <-------- tor_cosi.txt ---------------> Filename: tor_cosi.txt Title: Tor CoSi Author: Nicolas GAILLY Created: 09.03.2016 Status: draft 0. Introduction This document describes how to provide and use a decentralized witness cosigning mechanism in order to gain proactive transparency and public accountability for the Tor consensus documents. Directory Authorities (DA) send their document to this set of witnesses and embed the signature within the document. Tor relays and clients can choose to refuse a consensus document if it has not been accepted and signed by a threshold of witnesses. 1. Overview A weakness of the current DA system is that if any 5 of the 9 DAs’ keys are stolen or coerced they could be used to sign fake directories that the attacker might use secretly in another part of the world to compromise Tor clients in the attacker’s domain. We propose to address this class of attacks by incorporating decentralized witness cosigning (CoSi) into the directory signing process, which ensures that any consensus document must be not only signed by appropriate DAs, but also publicly witnessed, signed and logged by a larger group of servers acting as witnesses, before clients will accept the directory. A Tor relay or client expects to receive an additional "CoSi" signature alongside the consensus document. They verify if the signature is correct and whether a sufficient number of witnesses attested that the consensus document is valid or not. The Tor project would fix such a threshold in the default configuration but any user or relay is free to adjust this value to its own need. In order to verify the signature, they need to have the individuals public keys of all the witnesses beforehand. This "CoSi certificate" can be embedded in the software in the same way certificate pinning does. 2. Motivation Tor's DAs are comprised of 9 servers (and one extra for the bridges): four of them are in the US and 5 of them are in the EU. Attacking these central and vital points of the Tor network is clearly within the reach of state level adversaries if they were to collaborate. Recent stories about surveillance show that such a collaboration is already happening. For example, let's imagine a plausible situation where a state-level attacker secretly coerces and/or steals the private keys of 5 of the 9 DAs, takes them back to the Republic of Tyrannia where they control the ISPs and the country’s Internet connectivity to the rest of the world. The government embeds those keys in their “Great Firewall” type devices, and uses them to secretly MITM attack targeted Tor users within Tyrannia by giving them correctly-signed but completely false views of the Tor directory in which all of the available relays are run by the Tyrannian authorities. Since this attack does not attack the consensus documents that the legitimate DAs are regularly broadcasting to the rest of the world, neither the Tor project nor anyone else outside of Tyrannia will have the opportunity to see or become aware of the fake consensus documents, and not many people even inside Tyrannia might have the opportunity to detect the attack if it is carefully targeted against the small number of suspected activists and journalists the government does not like. The main goal of CoSi applied in Tor should be to ensure consensus document transparency: that is, ensure the property that any consensus document that any Tor client anywhere will accept has been observed and logged by a significant number of parties throughout the world, so that any misuse of a quorum of 5 DA keys anywhere will be quickly detectable (soon, if not necessarily during the signing process itself). 4. Design The first part will talk more about the architecture of a "CoSi" system and the second part will go into more detail about how such a system can be integrated in Tor. 4.1 Simplified Architecture The designated leader arranges all the witnesses in a tree. The public keys of each participants are aggregated to form an aggregate public key. The tree is only there for performance reasons and can be reconfigured at any point in time without affecting security (the latest experiments showed that we could run up to 8000 nodes with a 2 second delay for generating a signature). Once the tree is constructed, its "certificate" represents the aggregate public key and the hash of a Merkle tree containing all the individual public keys. This Merkle tree is needed in case some nodes are failing, so the verification of the signature can still be executed without any change by the client. These issues are covered later in the “Handling Exceptions” part. In a nutshell, a signature round broadcasts the message down the tree, and to each participant. At the end of a signature round, the client have a simple Schnorr signature to verify. Besides contributing to the signing, each witness can and should perform any readily feasible syntactic and semantic correctness checks on the leader’s proposed statements before signing off on them. They can / should probably publish logs of the statements they witness or simply make available a public mirror of everything that its tree roster has been asked to sign. An important point is that each signature is chained with the last one, so each witness also knows the full set of witnesses that accepted the last signature and whether the leader is acting malicious or not. 4.2 CoSi in Tor 4.2.1 Setup The CoSi system can be constructed using independent, diverse and decentralized witnesses. In the context of Tor, one could imagine to include the DA themselves (one could be the leader), and some of the best relays in term of availability and reputation. Due to the decentralized nature of CoSi, this system can also includes external organizations that are favorable and trusted by Tor (e.g. EFF). Another criteria for the tree construction includes the latency between witnesses. One can collect information about the communication latencies between the witnesses and construct a shortest-path spanning tree using this data in order to reduce the global latency of the system. One important property is that the system is under a closed membership policy. The certificate of the CoSi system will have to be embedded in the Tor code in a similar way as for certificate pinning. One obvious way to do it is to setup the set of witnesses as being the DAs and the set of (future) “backup directory servers” as their public keys will already be hard-coded into the Tor client software. That way the deployment cost is drastically reduced as software will already have the keys to verify a CoSi signature. 4.2.2 Operations Once the tree is setup and each one knows about it (have the certificate), then the signature process happens for each consensus document. The CoSi protocol produces a collective signature in response to the initiation of the protocol by a leader. This signature is then included in the consensus document so clients don't have to request it from another party. One issue for discussion is who should initiate CoSi protocol rounds and at what times. For example, each of the 9 DAs (or whatever subset is online) could independently initiate CoSi rounds on each directory consensus event, producing up to nine separate, redundant collective signatures on each directory consensus. Alternatively, the common case might be for one of the 9 DAs to be the CoSi initiator at a given time, with a round-robin leader-change mechanism ensuring that another leader takes over if the prior one becomes unavailable. A related issue for discussion is whether it could be problematic if there are two or more distinct collective signatures for a given directory consensus, and whether it is a problem if distinct subsets of 5 DAs might (perhaps accidentally) produce multiple slightly different, though valid and legitimately-signed, consensus documents at about the same time. In other words, does Tor directory consensus “need” strong consistency with a single serialized timeline, as Byzantine consensus protocols are intended to provide - or is weak consistency with occasional cases of multiple concurrent consensus documents and/or collective signatures acceptable? 4.2.3 Integration First of all, integrating CoSi would *not* immediately affect the fundamental structure or function of the current DAs: there could still be 9 of them, of which any 5 can authorize the release of a new consensus document, as they do now. Secondly, CoSi would not necessarily change anything about how the 9 DAs decide on how to compute these directory consensus documents; e.g., it would not prevent the DAs from working together to block the inclusion of (or assignment of bandwidth-weight to) relays that might be perceived by the DAs as doing bad things. Finally, full backward compatibility with old Tor clients and relay software may be maintained by treating the new CoSi-generated collective signature as just an additional signature that gets attached to and distributed with consensus documents. It may be treated as a special “10th virtual DA” that does not help authorize decisions but just publicly witnesses the output of the regular 9 DAs. Old client and relay software can simply ignore that new collective signature, whereas new software might look for it and over time gradually increase the threshold number of witnesses it expects to see. 4.3 Optional: Break-the-glass Emergency Directory Adjustments In case of emergency, the delay caused by having to coordinate among 5 DAs in order to make anything happen (i.e. excluding a set of malicious nodes) can be problematic. This section proposes a mechanism in which the CoSi witnesses can accept and witness not just “full consensus” documents (signed by 5 DAs), but can also accept “emergency adjustments”, which are highly-constrained deltas (diffs) to an existing full consensus document signed by a smaller threshold of DAs, e.g., 2 or even just 1. For example, the CoSi witness cosigning rules might require that an emergency directory-adjustment must: - be a diff against a “fresh”, recent full consensus document (perhaps *the* most recent one), - can make no modifications to the full consensus other than some pre-defined operations such as decreasing bandwidth weights assigned to relays, - cannot affect the directory-wide total bandwidth weight by more than X% (e.g., 1% or .1%). These suggestions are just a few imaginable rules to get the idea across; the “right” rules would of course need much more discussion. This way, if one or two DAs discovers or even strongly suspects an attack of some kind, they can take emergency countermeasures against the attack and be able to roll them out to clients quickly without having to get a full 5 DAs out of bed - but because the delta-consensus is still witness-cosigned automatically by (perhaps) all the DAs and a number of additional trusted relays, we get the strong accountability provision that the use of such a “break-the-glass” emergency provision will immediately become known to the other DAs as soon as they do get out of bed. Such a break-the-glass emergency adjustment mechanism could be designed, if desired, so that ordinary clients and relays cannot immediately tell the difference between a directory consensus produced via the normal threshold of 5 DAs and one that was produced as a delta via the emergency adjustment mechanism. Only the witness cosigners would necessarily need to know which collectively-signed directories were authorized via the full consensus procedure or via a break-the-glass adjustment. So if it’s important to keep it secret from the general public the precise reason for a particular directory update, that can be accommodated. Only the more-trusted group of witness cosigners (and obviously all the DAs themselves) would necessarily know the precise origin and administrative justification of a given directory update. With even fancier crypto, even the witnesses would not necessarily need to know, but that’s beyond the scope of this proposal and its desirability may be questionable at any rate. 4. Security implications 4.1 Cons Since the structure is a tree, if any node fails, there must be some failover mechanisms to restore connectivity between the children of the failed node and the rest of the tree. Since the DA reach consensus every hour [1], with the help of the gossiping network, the availability problem is not an issue. 4.2 Benefits Technically, it is quite easy to implement witness cosigning if the group of witnesses is small. If we want the group of witnesses to be large, however – and we do, to ensure that compromising transparency would require not just a few but hundreds or even thousands of witnesses to be colluding maliciously – then gathering hundreds or thousands of individual signatures could become painful and inefficient. Worse, every client would need to check all these signatures individually. The key technical contribution of our research is a distributed protocol that makes large, decentralized witness cosigning groups practical. This decentralized approach enables the security of the whole system to scale with the number of witnesses. Not only does this system dramatically increase the cost of successfully deploying an attack on the DA (the attacker would have to corrupt a large majority of the witnesses), it also decreases the incentive to launch such an attack because the threshold of witnesses that are required to sign the document for the signature to be accepted can be locally set on each client. 4.3 Differences between CoSi and Certificate Transparency Prior transparency mechanisms have two weaknesses. First they do not significantly increase the number of secret keys an attacker must control to compromise any client device, and client devices cannot even retroactively detect such compromise unless they can actively communicate with multiple well-known Internet servers. For example, even with Certificate Transparency, an attacker can forge an Extended Validation (EV) certificate for Chrome after compromising or coercing only three parties: one Certificate Authority (CA) and two log servers. Since many CAs and log servers are in US jurisdiction, such an attack is clearly within reach of the US government. If such an attack does occur, Certificate Transparency cannot detect it unless the victim device has a chance to communicate or gossip the fake certificate with other parties on the Internet – after it has already accepted and started using the fake digital certificate. In the case of Tor Transparency, the attack is harder because the attacker would have to compromise the three parties plus a majority of Directory Authorities but facing a state-level adversary the threat is still plausible. One way to increase the difficulty of the attack is to make sure the logs servers are scattered in different places of the world. Second, the attacker can still evade transparency by controlling the client’s Internet access paths. For example, a compromised Internet service provider (ISP) or corporate Internet gateway can defeat retroactive transparency mechanisms by persistently blocking a victim device’s access to transparency servers elsewhere on the Internet. Even if the user’s device is mobile, a state intelligence service such as China’s “Great Firewall” could defeat retroactive transparency mechanisms by persistently blocking connections from a targeted victim’s devices to external transparency servers, in the same way that China already blocks connections to many websites and Tor relays. Using CoSi requires the clients to have the list of public keys of all the witnesses embedded in the software, like certificate pinning. In order to reduce the size of this CoSi certificate, we embed the aggregated public key of all the witnesses and a hash representing the root of a Merkle tree containing the public key of all the witnesses. Using the certificate this way provides an universally-verifiable commitment to all the witnesses’ public keys, without the certificate actually containing them all. 5. Specifications 6. Compatibility 7. Implementation Implementation in Go is open source at: https://github.com/dedis/cothority 8. Performance 9. Acknowledgments This proposals has received some valuable feedback from Bryan Ford, Linus Gasser, Ismail Khoffi, Philipp Jovanovic, and Ludovic Barman. A. References [1] https://collector.torproject.org <-------------- END ----------------------->

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Re: [tor-dev] Latest state of the guard algorithm proposal (prop259) (April 2016)
by George Kadianakis 14 Apr '16

14 Apr '16

Fan Jiang <fanjiang(a)thoughtworks.com> writes: > [ text/plain ] > Hi George, > > Thanks for following up, > We have been updating the prop259 actively in recent two weeks, > >> >> It seems like the latest version of prop259 was posted a few weeks ago: >> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010625.html >> >> My understanding is that since then a few things have changed particularly >> with >> regards to the dystopic heuristic, and the various filtering torrc options. >> More discussion happened in the mailing list, but we have not posted a >> newer version of the proposal yet: >> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-April/010714.html >> >> > the newer version of prop259 is sort of feasible again. it's here > https://github.com/twstrike/torspec/blob/review/proposals/259-guard-selecti… > Ah great. Will read it and comment on it ASAP. I notice that the prop now contains many many implementation details (like variable names, etc.). Ideally, we should abstract those details and make them look more like a specification. > And, we have our fork of Tor *running* with new proposal: > https://github.com/twstrike/tor_for_patching/tree/prop259 > How is this going? Does it work as intended? Any graphs? I should find some time and run it myself soon. > > >> A few things: >> >> a) Are there still proposal design decisions that need to be taken and we >> are >> unclear on? I admit I'm a bit lost in the latest [tor-dev] thread, so >> maybe >> I can be of help somehow here? >> >> There are still some issues, like for_directory may leads to maintain two > sets of > sampled_set independently, which is not yet defined clearly in proposal. > Hm, how come this is happening? I would think that for_directory would now be just another filter (like the ipv6 one etc.) that can be applied on top of the sampled list. > <snip> > > c) Let me know if there are any open implementation questions that I could >> assist with. > > > About implementation, one problem is when we try to remove the global > *entry_guards*, > The following functions are still using the global list: > > we already get rid of these: > > //- update_node_guard_status (OK - called from *set_from_config and > // *parse_state. This is an optimization to set the using_as_guard flag.) > //- entry_guards_compute_status (OK - when a new consensus arrives) > //- log_entry_guards (OK - wont be used) > //- add_an_entry_guard (OK - wont be used) > //- entry_guard_register_connect_status (OK - wont be used) > //- entry_guards_set_from_config (OK - wont be used) > //- entry_guards_parse_state and entry_guards_update_state (OK - wont be > used) > //- choose_random_entry_impl (OK - wont be used) > > there are still some remaining: > > //- get_entry_guards() > //- num_live_entry_guards() > //- getinfo_helper_entry_guards() > //- entries_retry_helper() > //- any_bridge_supports_microdescriptors() // Don't quite understand this, > what's a microdescriptors? A microdescriptor is a new type of relay descriptor that is more compact. (well, it used to be new, but it's a few years old these days and most bridges support it afaik). They were introduced to reduce the download sizes of clients, because asking for thousands of normal descriptors required too much bandwidth. Microdescriptors include almost all the details of normal descriptors (like onion keys, etc.) but in a much more succinct format. That function checks if the bridge supports microdescriptors. If yes, it will ask it for its microdescriptor. Otherwise, it will just ask for the normal descriptor. (I'm actually not sure how that function gets away without checking the bridge version or something.) > //- any_bridge_descriptors_known() // Calling choose_random_entry to check > a bridge, which doesn't make sense. > Hah. I didn't know of that function either. That function seems to call choose_random_entry() just to check if bridges have been configured correctly and are ready to use. It doesn't actually use the return value of the function :) Basically, if that func returns not NULL, it means that at least one bridge is live and ready to be attempted. > > > Another issue is about finding a better way to handle configuration > changes, especially for EntryNodes, > UseBridges and ReachableAddresses. The treshould numbers like > N_PRIMARY_GUARDS should be different > in such cases. > Hmm, yes I have not thought how the primary guards heuristic would work when bridges are enabled. Why do you think the thresholds should be different? Thanks for the info. Will try to have feedback on the proposal tomorrow or early next week.

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