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Notes from network team meeting Wed 3/16/2016
by Isabela 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

Hello there, this is something new we are trying out. The goal is to improve communication between team members, since we are spread out through many different time zones and is hard to get everyone together at the same time for discussions and updates. == Notes from little t Tor team - Wed March 16th 13:30 UTC @ #tor-dev == Participants + updates: * nickm - trying to get 028 done, getting ready to help with 029 triage, fixing that old 027-authorities bug, and trying to make sure that all the sponsorS EOM items get done, special focus on module isolation right now * isabela - sent a few emails with exercise to start triaging for 029 / working on a proposal for our release process * dgoulet - working on prop#224 (#17238, dev branch ticket17238_029_01) / reviewed 028 tickets and cleaned up the "tor-hs" ticket queue also / plan on triaging for 029 by Friday then PlanetLibre * asn - worked mostly on prop224 - wrote a thread about design issues (https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010534.html) / working on GSoC preparations and review queue is empty so can help review code if needed * special - nothing much to report, been busy with travel and auxiliary responsibilities :< * Sebastian - helped implement 'sponsor' field on Trac / has ~8hrs next week to work on something that needs help * karsten - tried to find 028 tickets that need review, found one that's actually mine and that needed work, worked on that (#18460) == Discussion topics and action items: Triage 029 - first triage exercise is to mark sponsor tickets as: * 'sponsorY-must' means "We have promised this to sponsorY." * 'sponsorY-can' means "We can bill this to sponsorY, but we haven't promised this specifically." We will be looking into sponsor S, U and R tickets. Isabela sent a spreadsheet via email for people to use and mark the tickets. We should get it done by Friday EOM so we can move on with another triage exercise. If you have any questions, please reach out to isabela via irc or email. Meeting time discussion: Is impossible to have something that will work perfectly for everyone. We discussed a few possible solutions that Nick will compile and email the list to continue the discussion with other members of the team. We also decided on sharing meeting notes beyond the meet bot log. Triagging 'must-fix-before-028-rc': During this discussion we also ended up deciding on creating a new state for the review process 'need-merge', so when a ticket is done with the review process goes to this state. This is the equivalent to 'needs-nick-review' state we discussed during the Dev Meeting discussion. Some of the action items from the discussion are listed below. Mostly for folks to review tickets so we can close them and move one with 028-rc. Action Items ------------ * everybody look at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010534.html * nickm and dgoulet see if they have time to hang out when dgoulet is around for libreplanet * isabela to write her thoughts on release-engineering this stuff, and making broken things easier to revert * somebody open a ticket for a network-team mailing list : #18563 [DONE] * nickm will send an email about meeting times. * if you think something is in must-fix-before-028-rc and we can let it slip, please comment on the ticket. [people worked on it after the meeting] * dgoulet, Sebastian, teor: please take another look at the ed25519 patch and see if I fixed the issues in #18318 and #17668 ? * let's see if we can get weasel (or somebody else) to review or test my fix for #18253 * nickm asks athena for ETA on bugfix. == Next meeting and other updates: * I guess next meeting will depend on the results of the meeting time poll - we will keep the list updated. * We are having a proposal discussion meeting tomorrow, Thursday March 17th at 1500UTC - prop#267 * We had a proposal discussion meeting today as well, Wednesday March 16yh, on prop#224. You can check the log here: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2016/tor-dev.2016-03-16-15.03.html -- PM at TorProject.org gpg fingerprint = 8F2A F9B6 D4A1 4D03 FDF1 B298 3224 4994 1506 4C7B @isa

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Come work on Tor at Freedom of the Press Foundation!
by Garrett Robinson 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

Hello tor-devizens, Freedom of the Press Foundation is hosting a Mozilla-Ford Open Web Fellow for 2016. We have a lot of potential projects for our fellow to work on, depending on their skill set, but we have our fingers crossed for an applicant who is interested in working on Tor! SecureDrop, our flagship project, depends heavily on Tor and Tor Hidden Services to protect the communications of journalists and anonymous sources. If we end up accepting such an applicant, we would like to have them work with the Tor Project on issues that are pertinent to SecureDrop, particularly Next Generation Hidden Services and the proposed padding defenses for website fingerprinting attacks. The deadline for applications is *March 20th* (this Sunday). More info on our blog: https://freedom.press/blog/2016/01/apply-be-freedom-press-foundations-open-… Apply: https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/ Let me know if you have any questions! You can reply to this email on the list, or email me directly. Cheers, Garrett

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Interested in GSoC opportunity
by Deepankar Tyagi 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

Hi everyone, I am a computer science student at undergrad level, would love to contribute to Tor, currently in the process of drafting the proposal. This mail is an effort to seek guidance to define scope, goals and timeline more clearly. Currently interested in two ideas and plan to submit only one of these based on feedback and guidance from mentors. idea #1 Extending and Improving Krotor. This is continuation of my last year GSoC project in which libevent and Tor were ported to NaCl (a C/C++ sandbox environment on chrome), full detail can be seen at https://deepankar.io/gsoc and https://deepankar.io/krotor. It was later published on webstore and currently has close to 13k active users. A lot of improvement can be made to this project, viz supporting obfuscation, making it more user friendly, adding support for configuring exit gates etc, updating it to latest stable release. I would greatly appreciate any guidance on various matters for instance: making it more resistant to any privacy leaks such as dns leaks on webrtc and on windows due to no global policy of dns etc. I would be very grateful if anyone is willing to mentor for this. idea #2 Exitmap Improvements I got stuck when defining timeline for this project. I would appreciate any insights regarding what should be deliverable by mid-term of GSoC. Also this project will a involve lot of brainstorming, preferably with mentor, is there a possibility of weekly/every two weeks session for an hour or half hour with mentor on hangout/skype etc (at least in the beginning) What would be preferred means to get/see progress reports and preferred frequency of the same. Some hyperlinks: Github <https://github.com/codebuff> || LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/codebuff> || KroTor <https://deepankar.io/krotor> Best Regards. *Deepankar Tyagi* *Projects & Resume : deepankar.io <https://deepankar.io>*

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Prop259 simulator and results
by George Kadianakis 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

Hello there, I'm not sure what kind of statistics we get out of the current guard simulator. In general, we are interested in security and performance. For security we are trying to minimize our exposure to network. For performance, we want to minimize our downtime when our current guard becomes unreachable or after our network comes back up. Here are some concrete statistics that we could gather in the simulator: Security statistics: - Number of unique guards we connected to during the course of the simulation. - Time spent connected to lower priority guards while a primary guard was online. - Time spent connected to lower priority guards while a higher priority guard was online and the network was up. Performance statistics: - Time spent cycling through guards. - Time spent cycling through guards while network is up. - Time spent on dystopic mode. - Time spent on dystopic mode while the network was utopic. Is it possible to collect those statistics? I'm curious to learn how the current guard algorithm compares to the new prop259 on those aspects. What other stats are important here you think?

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GSOC: Panopticlick
by - - 15 Mar '16

15 Mar '16

Hello! My name is Akito Ono. I'm a computer science student in Japan and very intrested in participating in GSoC this year. I read docs about projects and I was particularly intrested in Panopticlick project. And I have some questions about Panopticlick. Is this project based on Libre-Panopticlick( https://github.com/qqTYXn7/browserprint) or building from scratch? Is programming language used in project designated? Best regards!

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User Behavior Tracking defenses in VMs
by bancfc＠openmailbox.org 15 Mar '16

15 Mar '16

Intended for qemu-discuss /cc/ libvir-list, whonix-devel, tor-dev *** Hello. I work on WhonixOS an anonymity distro based on Tor. This feature request is related to the topics of privacy and anonymity. Its a complex topic and probably not in your area of focus but I think it has important implications because security and privacy are very much related in today's hostile computing environment. Virtualization is useful in presenting an identical environment and set of "hardware" for each user which goes a long way in creating an anonymity set of systems. That way a system attacker, advertisers and online trackers would not be able to fingerprint a user or their hardware. The problem: Tracking techniques have become more sophisticated with time. They advanced from simple cookies to browser/device fingerprinting (which Tor Browser focuses on defeating) to user behavior fingerprinting. The latter is about profiling how a user types on a keyboard or uses a mouse [2]. Keystroke dynamics is a super creepy way to track users based on how long they press keys (dwell time) and the time between key presses (gap time). This is extremely accurate at identifying individuals because of how unique these measurements are. Advertising networks (Google, Facebook...) that fingeprprint users on both the clearnet and Tor can deanonymize users. This technique is already actively used in the wild [6][7]. Potential Solutions: Since input devices are all emulated its a great opportunity to stop this profiling technique. * A security researcher designed a proof of concept plugin for Chrome browser that mitigates this. Implementing something like the PoC addon in [1] known as KeyBoardPrivacy. Some random delay in milliseconds in a 50 millisecond range for dwell and gap times for the emulated keyboards is enough to skew the values to render this attack useless while not affecting performance. * The changes made to Tor Borwser to make JS timers more coarse grained but constant (250ms for keyboard events) were not enough to stop keystroke dynamics fingerprinting because a malicious script can evict the cache and allow extrapolation of true timing events within 1-5ms accuracy .[3][5] Their goal is to instead add jitter to the timers [4]. A similar solution proposed in [4] can be implemented in all QEMU-KVM timers to mitigate both attacks. [1] https://paul.reviews/behavioral-profiling-the-password-you-cant-change/ [2] http://jcarlosnorte.com/security/2016/03/06/advanced-tor-browser-fingerprin… [3] https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2015/07/30/double-bill-password-hashing… [4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16110 [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1517 [6] http://scraping.pro/no-captcha-recaptcha-challenge/ [7] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/01/facebook-to-silent-track-users-…

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GSoC: Tor Messenger CONIKS integration
by Elias Rohrer 12 Mar '16

12 Mar '16

Hello nice people of the Tor project! I'm very interested in using the Google Summer of Code stipend to integrate the CONIKS key verification protocol into Tor Messenger. So I wanted to say 'Hi!' and introduce myself: I'm a computer science student at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in Berlin, Germany. The main focus of my studies lies on security, computer networks (such as the peer-to-peer ones) and privacy enhancing technologies. In the last years I mostly worked with C/C++, but these days I'm learning erlang – mostly for its benefits in concurrent & network scalable programming, but also to learn 'something different'. This brings me to some questions regarding the project: If I understand correctly (after reading [1], there are three parts which should get implemented in course of the project: - A server component which stores the tamper-resistant database and would be run by the identity providers. - An auditor module which tracks the states of the server and publishes its view, so users can check that theirs is consistent with it. - And a client side plugin for Tor Messenger written in JavaScript. Concerning the two first parts: What would be the requirements concerning the language of the server? The Projects page list JavaScript and C as required languages, but would you also consider a server component written in erlang? I could do that in C/C++, but since I'm experimenting with erlang I thought I'd ask, especially, because I could imagine that the auditor functionality could be implemented into a XMPP server such as ejabberd or prosody. So, while the CONIKS provider would be more or less centralised for Tor Messenger, third parties like the XMPP server hosters could act as auditors by just loading up a plugin for their XMPP server. This Idea is based on the Q&A found in the ticket [1]. Do you think this would be a viable idea to roll out the auditor software? This should be it for my first questions. I'll study the CONIKS paper more in depth in the next days and will come back at you if more questions come up concerning the project idea – if that's okay with you. Best Wishes! Elias Rohrer / _tnull @ irc [1]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17961)

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What is Design?
by Spencer 12 Mar '16

12 Mar '16

1 de·sign verb \di-ˈzīn\ To plan and make decisions about [something]; to plan and make [something] for a specific use or purpose, or no purpose at all; to think of [something, such as a plan]; to plan [something]. ORIGIN - late Middle English as a verb in the sense 'to designate'; from Latin designare 'to designate', reinforced by French désigner; the noun is via French from Italian. TL;DR - to designate. --- Copied -dev, -ux, and -teachers once for relevance but, should there be, responses live on -talk. Wordlife, Spencer

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Latency measurement from exits
by Zack Weinberg 10 Mar '16

10 Mar '16

Before I go reinventing wheels, has anyone got code to measure network latency (either RTT or one-way packet travel time will do) from a chosen Tor exit to an arbitrary destination? Latency from client to exit would also be useful. Thanks, zw

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Tor browser (and releated) improvement ideas
by Michał Dziczkowski 10 Mar '16

10 Mar '16

Here are few of my improvement ideas for Tor Browser (and releated): * add more possible proxy hosts * make that TOR probes very often all avaliable hosts and pick every time the fastest one to prevent lagging while sites load * add a module with discovers the site load time and it determine that it's (or it's content) load to slow then would self switch proxy for the site to make it load faster * don't make tor browser install by default the No-Script plugin because it's preventing sites from working correctly (and it's very annoying to unblock each time scripts for each page, site or server) --- Mcgiwer

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