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[GSoC 2016] Roster - Gamification for Tor Operators (Sean Saito)
by Sean Saito 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

Hi! I have finished and submitted my final proposal for GSoC yesterday. This summer I would like to complete Roster, a Tor Project initiative I’ve been working on since last year. It is basically a social incentivization scheme to gamify operating a Tor relay. All the details are included in the Google doc, and, while the deadline for edits has passed, I would appreciate any comments and feedback. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wOBUhOPAAWTLfQIt4ChKixLMgIrZlO3YBQ-eixh… Thanks a lot! Best, Sean

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Tor 0.2.8 and Fallback Directory Mirrors
by Tim Wilson-Brown - teor 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

Dear Tor App Developers, Just a heads' up that tor 0.2.8 includes a fallback directory mirrors feature, where tor clients bootstrap from a set of hard-coded long-lived directory mirrors. This makes bootstrap more reliable, and makes it harder to block tor. The wiki has an entry with more details. [0] We're currently trying to finalise a list of around 100 fallback directory mirrors by the time tor 0.2.8-stable is released. [1] If we have this many mirrors, I am confident we won't overwhelm any of the mirrors when an app like Orbot, Tor Browser, or Tails switches to tor 0.2.8. (Are there any other tor apps with millions of users that I've missed?) If this feature does cause problems, or if your app needs to bootstrap only from the authorities (Tails time syncing? [2]), the fallback directory mirrors feature can be disabled using the tor config option "UseDefaultFallbackDirs 0". Tim [0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/FallbackDirectoryMirrors> [1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17158 <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17158> [2]: https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/Time_syncing/ <https://tails.boum.org/contribute/design/Time_syncing/> Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP 968F094B teor at blah dot im OTR CAD08081 9755866D 89E2A06F E3558B7F B5A9D14F

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Much-revised draft, RFC: removing current obsolete clients from the network
by Nick Mathewson 26 Mar '16

26 Mar '16

[This is a significantly revised version of the last version of this proposal draft, sent here for comment. The last version of this draft was https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-September/009587.html . This is more or less a complete rewrite, after I convinced myself that the original ideas wouldn't work. Part of the functionality of that old draft has been subsumed in proposal 264.] 1. Introduction Frequently, we find that very old versions of Tor should no longer be supported on the network. To remove relays is easy enough: we simply update the directory authorities to stop listing relays that advertise versions that are too old. But to disable clients is harder. In another proposal I describe a system for letting future clients go gracefully obsolete. This proposal explains how we can safely disable the obsolete clients we have today (and all other client versions of Tor to date, assuming that they will someday become obsolete). 1.1. Why disable clients? * Security. Anybody who hasn't updated their Tor client in 5 years is probably vulnerable to who-knows-what attacks. They aren't likely to get much anonymity either. * Withstand zombie installations. Some Tors out there were once configured to start-on-boot systems that are now unmaintained. (See 1.4 below.) They put needless load on the network, and help nobody. * Be able to remove backward-compatibility code. Currently, Tor supports some truly ancient protocols in order to avoid breaking ancient versions or Tor. This code needs to be maintained and tested. Some of it depends on undocumented or deprecated or non-portable OpenSSL features, and makes it hard to produce a conforming Tor server implementation. * Make it easier to write a conforming Tor relay. If a Tor relay needs to support every Tor client back through the beginning of time, that makes it harder to develop and test compatible implementations. 1.2. Is this dangerous? I don't think so. This proposal describes a way to make older clients gracefully disconnect from the network only when a majority of authorities agree that they should. A majority of authorities already have the ability to inflict arbitrary degrees of sabotage on the consensus document. 1.3. History The earliest versions of Tor checked the recommended-versions field in the directory to see whether they should keep running. If they saw that their version wasn't recommended, they'd shut down. There was an "IgnoreVersion" option that let you keep running anyway. Later, around 2004, the rule changed to "shut down if the version is _obsolete_", where obsolete was defined as "not recommended, and older than a version that is recommended." In 0.1.1.7-alpha, we made obsolete versions only produce a warning, and removed IgnoreVersion. (See 3ac34ae3293ceb0f2b8c49.) We have still disabled old tor versions. With Tor 0.2.0.5-alpha, we disabled Tor versions before 0.1.1.6-alpha by having the v1 authorities begin publishing empty directories only. In version 0.2.5.2-alpha, we completely removed support for the v2 directory protocol used before Tor 0.2.0; there are no longer any v2 authorities on the network. Tor versions before 0.2.1 will currently not progress past fetching an initial directory, because they believe in a number of directory authority identity keys that no longer sign the directory. Tor versions before 0.2.4 are (lightly) throttled in multihop circuit creation, because we prioritize ntor CREATE cells over TAP ones when under load. 1.4. The big problem: slow zombies and fast zombies It would be easy enough to 'disable' old clients by simply removing server support for the obsolete protocols that they use. But there's a problem with that approach: what will the clients do when they fail to make connections, or to extend circuits, or whatever else they are no longer able to do? * Ideally, I'd like such clients to stop functioning _quietly_. If they stop contacting the network, that would be best. * Next best would be if these clients contacted the network only occasionally and at different times. I'll call these clients "slow zombies". * Worse would be if the clients contact the network frequently, over and over. I'll call these clients "fast zombies". They would be at their worst when they focus on authorities, or when they act in synchrony to all strike at once. One goal of this proposal is to ensure that future clients to not become zombies at all; and that ancient clients become slow zombies at worst. 2. Some ideas that don't work. 2.1. Dropping connections based on link protocols. Tor versions before before 0.2.3.6-alpha use a renegotiation-based handshake instead of our current handshake. We could detect these handshakes and close the connection at the relay side if the client attempts to renegotiate. I've tested these changes on versions maint-0.2.0 through maint-0.2.2. They result in zombies with the following behavior: The client contact each authority it knows about, attempting to make a one-hop directory connection. It fails, detects a failure, then reconnects more and more slowly ... but one hour later, it resets its connection schedule and starts again. In the steady state this appears to result in about two connections per client per authority per hour. That is probably too many. (Most authorities would be affected: of the authorities that existed in 0.2.2, gabelmoo has moved and turtles has shut down. The authorities Faravahar and longclaw are new. The authorities moria1, tor26, dizum, dannenberg, urras, maatuska and maatuska would all get hit here.) (We could simply remove the renegotiation-detection code entirely, and reply to all connections with an immediate VERSIONS cell. The behavior would probably be the same, though.) If we throttled connections rather than closing them, we'd only get one connnection per authority per hour, but authorities would have to keep open a potentially huge number of sockets. 2.2. Blocking circuit creation under certain circumstances In tor 0.2.5.1-alpha, we began ignoring the UseNTorHandshake option, and always preferring the ntor handshake where available. Unfortunately, we can't simply drop all TAP handshakes, since clients and relays can still use them in the hidden service protocol. But we could detect these versions by: Looking for use of a TAP handshake from an IP not associated with with any known relay, or on a connection where the client did not authenticate. (This could be from a bridge, but clients don't build circuits that go to an IntroPoint or RendPoint directly after a bridge.) This would still result in clients not having directories, however, and retrying once an hours. 3. Ideas that might work 3.1. Move all authorities to new ports We could have each authority known to older clients start listening for connections at a new port P. We'd forward the old port to the new port. Once sufficiently many clients were using the new ports, we could disable the forwarding. This would result in the old clients turning into zombies as above, but they would only be scrabbling at nonexistent ports, causing less load on the authorities. [This proposal would probably be easiest to implement.] 3.2. Start disabling old link protocols on relays We could have new relays start dropping support for the old link protocols, while maintaining support on the authorities and older relays. The result here would be a degradation of older client performance over time. They'd still behave zombieishly if the authorities dropped support, however. 3.3. Changing the consensus format. We could allow 'f' (short for "flag") as a synonym for 's' in consensus documents. Later, if we want to disable all Tor versions before today, we can change the consensus algorithm so that the consensus (or perhaps only the microdesc consensus) is spelled with 'f' lines instead of 'f' lines. This will create a consensus which older clients and relays parse as having all nodes down, which will make them not connect to the network at all. We could similarly replace "r" with "n", or replace Running with Online, or so on. In doing this, we could also rename fresh-until and valid-until, so that new clients would have the real expiration date, and old clients would see "this consensus never expires". This would prevent them from downloading new consensuses. [This proposal would result in the quietest shutdown.]

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[GSoC '16] Exitmap project - Final Proposal
by Mridul Malpotra 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hey everyone! I have completed my proposal on the project Exitmap improvements. Sorry for submitting it late. Link for suggestions: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AqjH3AsBbfesJg36SZg1frPQsdpAnJmzH8k1-G6… Some points that have changed from the previous discussion: 1. Telnet/SNMP sniffing attacks would not be appropriate for Exitmap as it is an active attack scanner compared to say HoneyConnector etc. hence it has not been included. 2. I have added most of the points that I had suggested above with tweaks as advised by Dr. Winter. I will be submitting the proposal in an hour. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, -- Mridul Malpotra Undergrad @ IIIT-Delhi <http://www.iiitd.ac.in/> mridulmalpotra.github.io ============================= PGP keyID: 0xb716e33ab6d0a653 <http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xB716E33AB6D0A653>

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Re: [tor-dev] GSoC proposal: Panopticlick
by Akito Ono 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hi Georg, >Thanks. What does "check fingerprint's uniqueness" entail? Is it just a >"Unique? - Yes/No"-thing? If not, what are your ideas in this regard? I think it is not a "Yes/No"-thing. My idea is that the uniqueness of fingerprint is evaluated in each element relatively in recorded data and total uniqueness of a fingerprint is calculated by those ratios. I added my ideas to my proposal. Best regards, Akito

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Notes from the prop259 proposal reading group
by George Kadianakis 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hello, we had a meeting about proposal 259 "New Guard Selection Behaviour". You can see the logs here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2016/tor-dev.2016-03-23-15.01.log.txt Some notes: - The latest version of the proposal can be found here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010625.html There is also some discussion with Tim that has been happening in that thread since yesterday. It's likely that the proposal will be slightly changed (read: improved) as implementation and testing proceeds. The implementation of the proposal is currently happening here: https://github.com/twstrike/tor_for_patching/tree/prop259 - We discussed whether the guard algorithm should care about circuit restrictions like requiring that the guard of a circuit needs to be Stable (needs_uptime) or Fast (needs_capacity). We decided that for now the algorithm should be able to handle these restrictions, by skipping to the next guard that satisfies the conditions in case the top guard does not. This is also how the current guard algorithm works. In the future we should make it so that all Guards are both Stable and Fast, so that this stupid check does not need to happen [TODO: I should open a ticket for this if it doesn't already exist]. - We discussed how ReachableAddresses should work with regards to guardlists. A suggestion by Tim came from here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010630.html who says: "I suggest that we compose the set of UTOPIC guards based on addresses that are reachable and preferred (or, if there are no guards with preferred addresses, those guards that are reachable). I suggest that we use the same mechanism with DYSTOPIC guards, but add a port restriction to 80 & 443 to all the other restrictions. (This may result in the empty set.)" I think this suggstion makes sense for now. - We also talked about directory guards and how they should work but we didn't come to a conclusion. My current intuition is that if a directory circuit appears that requires a directory guard, we treat it as a constraint the same way we treat needs_capacity and needs_uptime. So if our top guard cannot be a directory guard (is not a V2Dir), we skip it and go down our list till we find a guard that does. In the future (almost) all guards will be directory guards so this should become less of an issue (see #12538). - Finally, a topic that came up after the meeting in: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010635.html had to do with how we treat bad guards in SAMPLED_UTOPIC_GUARDS and SAMPLED_DYSTOPIC_GUARDS. So if suddenly 90% of the guards in SAMPLED_UTOPIC_GUARDS drop out of the consensus, what do we do? We mark them as bad, and then what? Do we remove them from the sampled list? Or do we keep them in there in case they come back? (This latter behavior is what tor currently does). But then if we keep them, don't we also need to add some more guards in there to make up for the bad ones? How exactly should this work? Some thinking needs to be done here. - We also discussed the need for good debug logging in the prop259 tor branch, so that we can test it ourselves. Ideally, the logging should be nice and intuitive, so that we can monitor the logs every now and then and check if the guard picking works properly. For example, if the algorithm keeps on switching guards all the time, there is a problem. If the algo is using the 5th guard while the 1st guard is up, it's a problem. Good logging should be able to reveal all these problems without having to spend 20 minutes investigating every new log message.

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[GSoC 16] Proposal to work on the Ahmia.fi search engine
by Ismael R 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hi everyone, I'm a french student and I would like to share my GSoC application with all of you. I plan to work on the Ahmia hidden service search engine. Because of my experience with python, django and web in general, I feel like I can make a substantial contribution to this project during summer. I'm also very interested about the Tor ecosystem, and privacy in general. You can read my proposal on Google doc [1] or download a pdf [2]. You are welcome to comment it, I'm open to suggestions. Best regards, Ismael R. [1] : https://goo.gl/AT37hA [2] : http://dl.free.fr/f6EMq8vOu

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Review of GSoC proposal - Ahmia.fi
by Srikrishna 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hi people, Sorry for the late approach. Here is my proposal for the project, Improving Ahmia.fi, search engine for hidden services. Any suggestions are most welcome. Thanks to Juha ( juha.nurmi(a)ahmia.fi ) for helping me out with the proposal. I'll be available on irc as 'skrish13' or you can comment on the doc itself or reply here :) Link for my proposal -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GOQMi7qkR7Ppuh4sF5EoSv4Io5D2Dwpz8OyzNoi… -- Thanks and Regards Srikrishna <Attached my PGP signature> <Using PGP/MIME, notify me for Inline PGP>

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[GSoC] CONIKS implementation for Tor Messenger
by Huy Vu Quoc 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Dear devs, My name is Huy, and I am a computer science student at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam. GSoC is a great opportunity for me to contribute to Tor. I have been watching the development of Tor Messenger since its release. As my major is cryptography, I find the idea “implement and integrate CONIKS for Tor Messenger” very interesting. I am studying the CONIKS paper and my confusions were mostly answered in Elias's thread. I'm thinking about how to integrate CONIKS module to current implementation of Tor Messenger. I have some questions to ask: - A standard for data formats & protocol: I know the standard is essential for the project, so can I define a standard when developing (with your review) or I have to wait for your work in future? Another question about GSoC: - What should be deliverable by mid-term of GSoC? Btw, I also created a pull-request for ctypes-otr project on Github. Best, Huy Vu

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WTF is going on? An evolutionary biology approach to the human condition
by Hugo Maxwell Connery 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

Dr. E. O. Wilson. 40 mins + 20 mins questions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWLoluq-HCo How and why. /Hugo PS: Sorry, this may be completely outside of the normal channel of this space. I hope that some members are shocked by this presentation. I believe in tech, but more importantly I believe in the informed.

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