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Re: [tor-dev] Pluggable Transports v1 spec rewrite.
by Nathan Freitas 29 Oct '15

29 Oct '15

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015, at 09:19 AM, Yawning Angel wrote: > Hello all, > > In an attempt to make Pluggable Transports more accessible to other > people, and to have a spec that is more applicable and useful to other > projects that seek to use Pluggable Transports for circumvention, I have > drafted a re-write of the spec. > > This is not intended to alter existing behavior, but instead make it > clear that the whole "Pluggable Transports" thing isn't just for Tor. > > Unless people have serious objections, this will replace the existing > PT spec, to serve as a stop-gap while the next revision of the PT spec > (that does alter behavior) is being drafted/implemented. > Any small or big changes to highlight that push us to the more accessible goal?

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Re: [tor-dev] Pluggable Transports v1 spec rewrite.
by Hugo Maxwell Connery 29 Oct '15

29 Oct '15

Hi, A commendable effort. It is both deserved and pleasant that Tor hold the "gold standard" for a low latency, privacy enhancing, distributed, collaborative network. A perhaps more crowning achievement could be the fostering of a diverse ecosystem of related technologies. This effort continues to signal the Tor community's belief in open, free(dom), collaboration in the space. Hats off ! Hugo ________________________________________ Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:19:01 +0000 From: Yawning Angel <yawning(a)schwanenlied.me> To: tor-dev(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-dev] Pluggable Transports v1 spec rewrite. Message-ID: <20151029131901.3bbe0a20(a)schwanenlied.me> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Hello all, In an attempt to make Pluggable Transports more accessible to other people, and to have a spec that is more applicable and useful to other projects that seek to use Pluggable Transports for circumvention, I have drafted a re-write of the spec. This is not intended to alter existing behavior, but instead make it clear that the whole "Pluggable Transports" thing isn't just for Tor. Unless people have serious objections, this will replace the existing PT spec, to serve as a stop-gap while the next revision of the PT spec (that does alter behavior) is being drafted/implemented. Regards, -- Yawning Angel

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Reminders: this week's Tor dev meeting is still at 1330 UTC today
by Nick Mathewson 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

Hi! Reminder 1: There is a weekly meeting where we talk about development progress on the program "tor". Reminder 2: It has been at 1330 UTC; it is still at 1330 UTC for this week. (Remember, some of the world has made DST changes, but not all of the world.) Reminder 3: It will be at a different time (TBD) next week. Thanks, all! -- Nick

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TB 5.0.3 for OpenBSD released
by attila 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

The Tor BSD Diversity Project (TDP) is proud to announce the release of Tor Browser (TB) version 5.0.3 for OpenBSD. TDP (https://torbsd.github.io) is an effort to extend the use of the BSD Unixes into the Tor ecosystem, from the desktop to the network. The 5.0.3 release is the sixth release of the Tor Browser from TDP. To install TB for OpenBSD, please see http://mirrors.nycbug.org/pub/snapshots/packages/amd64/README if you are running OpenBSD -current on amd64. TDP is focused on diversifying the Tor network, with TB being the flagship project. Additional efforts are made to increase the number of *BSD relays on the Tor ntwork. Since its launch in March 2015, TDP has made significant contributions. In addition to the TB releases, both BSDCan and BSDCon Brasil featured TDP-focused meetings. In early October, the TDP focused presentation (http://www.queair.net/br-pres) prompted a significant increase in Tor relays in Brazil. Before the presentation, there were around 22 Tor relays, all of which were Linux in addition to two Windows nodes. In the weeks after the presentation, several new *BSD Tor relays appeared, accounting for up to 35% of bandwidth provided by new Tor relays in Brazil. Finally, TDP is working to convince BSD-using businesses to follow Mozilla's December 2014 example to run Tor relays. At this point, New York Internet has commited to running two high-bandwidth relays, one FreeBSD and the other OpenBSD, at its facility in Bridgewater, New Jersey. TDP's source code repository resides at http://github.com/torbsd. If you want to build the ports from source under OpenBSD-current the current tarball is available at http://bits.haqistan.net/~attila/tbb.tgz Feel free to bug me if you need help (contact infos on my home page: http://trac.haqistan.net/~attila) TDP is seeking funding to continue and extend its efforts. Please contact us if interested in assisting TDP, allowing us to dedicate more time to the project. Pax, -A -- http://trac.haqistan.net | attila(a)stalphonsos.com | 0xE6CC1EDB

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Feedback on CollecTor web redesign
by Karsten Loesing 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi devs, I just finished a redesign of the CollecTor website and would appreciate your feedback: https://metrics.torproject.org/index2.html For reference, the old CollecTor website is still available here: https://metrics.torproject.org/index.html https://metrics.torproject.org/formats.html Let me add that I'm not a web designer, and let me prove that statement by telling you that <i>all</i> HTML on that website was written using vim. I'm more than happy to accept patches or suggestions, though I'll likely ask you to explain them to me. Thanks! All the best, Karsten -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJWJpaaAAoJEJD5dJfVqbCr8/YIAIimH7j5Z2qr7OwfhBrH20MJ fNoBEdFBjSveWTYsB/77yZx1mEtDTXI/FCCQM5AURmE82SUJQ1Ocumn+J2mVgdmh hobxFrQBnsSWdK0qDtyNc7U5oDX7P6ruoBdfwBtFppXpp/VHkFsU0TIiMxcqGcUH yuHzRlaSIUpOXzaFl4STeEM9zmFqaR8+qayteWrWQpLMHf3SOksXKcr14+8CZmsl C7YopnoLqglo0dQA9FjM3U+w9MnEoHHskN4Yl4ZkQFGYPziqNRFTHmvCoKEMUz3u 0o1Emcmxc9jaZbyBU8Vbh474uEXM2ZtWSlMUt9M3dBRkIyuHy6lcBMS5q3i2wXc= =hHc4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[Metrics Team] Metrics Team mailing list and Metrics Team wiki page
by Karsten Loesing 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello Metrics Team members, hello devs, the Metrics Team now has a team wiki page and a team mailing list: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/MetricsTeam https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/metrics-team As described on the wiki page, the mailing list "is public in the sense that anyone can subscribe and read archives. But it's moderated on first post, meaning that your first post will be reviewed to make sure it's not spam and on topic and all further posts will go directly to the list. Feel free to subscribe and just listen if you want, and feel free to post if you have a question that you think is on topic." Everyone here should feel free to subscribe if they're interested in Metrics Team discussions. We should still move all discussions that are interesting to more people in Tor than just the Metrics Team to the tor-dev@ mailing list. Let's see how this works out. Note that future announcements, including meeting reminders, will go to the metrics-team@ list. (FWIW, there will be NO meeting tomorrow but next week.) All the best, Karsten -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJWMIJHAAoJEJD5dJfVqbCrpZcIALEmgZuRxflQHm5mTYhevYAn T5+tbclKDjjo3hfVmMdQOTtJFkLzkoO/jX4zTTuRiN3O+3jtcAcAtQ/xLLxA/wP3 wMJ76aRe6GIJ7lfO1+GQGKQCO1wO8lWDrY5vEr3yARWZB2KiSaFfWofe7nHq1G2V HjlUz+JeuAEWsLTxlkq+g3nrLpGtsEip3h85NA7pIicik35D1/W7S3jy/L1UKKO9 noH2QUBbQpfO0oW+Tjq+aYLO7hp98ThNO6JFDVM5tVOoDsxAnlMWtJQihDAlK7b0 5+sH6ixYBuvOOvoOCRl/3DJqTuQO+IpCcAGI7qLJOpMCIrAcsq0Lwaz5tJrieSk= =8Zhk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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1-1-1 task exchange meeting on Thursday, Oct 29, 15:00 UTC in #tor-dev
by Karsten Loesing 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello devs, we'll have another 1-1-1 task exchange meeting on Thursday, October 29, 2015, 15:00 UTC in #tor-dev https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20151029T15 Note how this may be a different time in your timezone based on the insight that we have all saved enough daylight for the year. Quick reminder: The idea of the 1-1-1 task exchange meeting is that participants get 1 minute to describe a task that would take somebody else roughly 1 hour and that they will do within 1 week. It could be to review a document, write some analysis code, fix a small bug, and so on. It's best to come prepared with a task or two to get the most out of this. In a perfect world people would give one task for each task they take, but that is not required. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/1-1-1-task-exchange Talk to you tomorrow. All the best, Karsten -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJWMHz2AAoJEJD5dJfVqbCr5e8H/3hPCDeEmrXuzEX4UZXxHoa+ RAsl5RN/Q2XFXMFayxno5BaGRBclusCDlbadOHcBcJeaZmETrfLmV1pN4OJA0yO9 RpNMcujl5VdOJSNcw5zxXn+QnHQPEqOUX4wFXuj/1BoAVRaek43IuqPTDTECNMRh 92vMaSJIQWxtudk5h0qhzB+DAEJSyTAU3gHH1yFecOITT2Nr69h6//WJIVn83rKW ViwLkQ4CoRfpp3aXyNRmMBEFj08bx09EAhI7bEkXYKf5oug5S/ah/YmHkHtfq+2D L9iz6vV/DdgXja/kcjMkakUvRAcSZPdNmmJwAqym2jCk+8FN9MsLW1ktL/R12xQ= =wU4R -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Desired exit node diversity
by grarpamp 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 8:44 AM, tor-dev had: > I agree with Roger that ideally all relays can be exits (and since > we're being ideal, we'll assume that 'exit' means to every port). And > the network location distribution of relays by bandwidth is > proportional to both the client destination selection over time and > general Internet traffic over time, which match each other since we're > being ideal, and also matter since we're using an ideal trust-aware path > selection algorithm. And network wide route selection is such that > there is no congestion (generalizing Roger's assumption of infinite > exit capacity). Guessing that... assuming you can ship and calculate all the relay data / DHT / weights / KEX / circuits / preferences without bogging down your network or cpu... More relays being exits yields higher maximum possible path diversity. More relays being exits yields higher potential aggregate throughput between the network and clearnet. More exits yields broader more complete location overlay relavent to users (more relays yields more guards), datacenteres, and clearnet services (though there's as yet no attempt to exit near a service unless done manually). However when subject to global passive adversary tapping lots of the fiber, and you turn up more relays as exits (which are also non-exit relays by nature), you're adding lots more unused bandwidth over the same current consumption, leading to lots of unused quiet portions of the network. Which seems a greater potential for the adversary to "look, user just shot a unique traffic pattern completely through the quiet zone, gotcha". Whereas when the network links are full with clocked traffic (and fill traffic if there would otherwise be slack space) that observation attack is hardly as possible, to relavently impossible. If true, it seems to me adding more [non] exits should be pegged to some metrics and solicited on need / planning rather than turning up 6000 exits all at once. > In our ongoing work on trust-aware path selection, we assume a trust > distribution that will be the default used by a Tor client if another > distribution is not specified. (Most users will not have a reasoned > understanding of who they actually need to worry most about, and even > if they somehow got that right would not have a good handle how that > adversary's resources are distributed.) We call this adversary "The > Man", who is equally likely to be everywhere (each AS) on the > network. For relay adversaries, we assume that standing up and running > a relay has costs so weight a bit to make relays that have been around > a long time slightly more likely to be trusted. tor-relays had talk of individual humans keyparty signing their relays and including that WOT along with other trust and meta metrics in the consensus or other queryable datastore that could be used by the user to select preferred relay sets in whichever sensible or silly ways suited them. An adversary standing up relays has costs. Adversaries standing their human agents in public, even if their undercover is maintained, has additional costs and risks. > You > would then be faced with the political nightmare of issuing default > policies that tells users they should route with a weighting that says > country foo has an x percent chance of being your adversary, but > country bar has a y percent chance. (Likewise also have similar > statements that substitute 'large multinational corp.', 'major > criminal organization', 'specific big government agency that is > getting all the press lately' etc. for "country" in the last > sentence.) ======== In a sense this is like the original 'valid' flag, which you got by mailing me and having me manually approve your relay (and without which you would never be used as the entry or exit point in a circuit). Periodically I wonder if we should go back to a design like that, where users won't pick exit relays that don't have the "socially connected" badge. Then I opt against wanting it, since I worry that we'd lose exactly the kind of diversity we need most, by cutting out the relays whose operators we don't know. But both sides of that are just guessing. Let's find out! ======== These type of things may be better suited to a system where the users contribute their research and knowledge about the network into the network metadata db, and the users can query it to make their own decisions, follow other users prebuilt selection templates, or stick with the provided defaults.

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[FWD: Re: Apple developer account + codesigning]
by Mike Perry 28 Oct '15

28 Oct '15

Here is some info about OSX codesigning, courtesy of Mike Tigas. It sounds like undoing the codesigning to verify build (and signing machine) integrity will be tricky. If anyone has more info on how to do that, it would be appreciated. ----- Forwarded message from Mike Tigas <mike(a)tig.as> ----- Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2015 01:29:02 -0400 From: Mike Tigas <mike(a)tig.as> To: Mike Perry <mikeperry(a)torproject.org> Subject: Re: Apple developer account + codesigning Hey Mike, Cool seeing y'all at that CPJ thing briefly. Yeah, that account is what you'll need to get the Apple-signed certs that let you codesign an app & allow it to launch unimpeded -- regardless of App Store or not. Used to be separate accounts for Mac vs iOS, but looks like it's just one account for everything Apple. (More info in the middle below on how to get the cert you need, etc.) On another open-source thing I work on <http://tabula.technology/>, we have a cross-platform JRuby program that we turn into a .app for Mac. We avoid the XCode IDE altogether (using a tool called `jarbundler` that turns our jar into a Mac .app bundle for us) and use the command-line "codesign" tool that comes with MacOSX or XCode (can't remember which). The invocation is basically like: codesign -f -s 'Developer ID Application: Mike Tigas (68QUP6KP2C)' /path/to/Foo.app Where the `-s` argument is the ID of the certificate you end up with from Apple -- see my comment here about "For production builds...": https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula/blob/fe6b105ca4f84ea64975d8ddc876dce8d1… Once you have your Apple Developer account, link 3 in that comment is where you'll get your cert. There's a little wizard for it that walks you through it. (You want to be in Mac Apps -> Certificates -> All, click + to add a certificate, and you want a Production -> Developer ID, for an Application.) In our case we had to manually sign another OSX framework (Java) that we bundled with the app, so there's two invocations of the `codesign` command. We previously didn't do that (in https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula/blob/c21b27c867ecdb578f97667310ea8b21e0… ), instead invoking `codesign` with the `--deep` flag, which tries to recursively sign all executable binaries inside the target (but there's some peculiarity with the Java OSX framework that prevented us from doing it). So just throwing that out there as another option to try. If this is for TBB or something else with a bunch of binaries inside, you'll have to keep this in mind. I've also discovered that this is a bitch to test, since once you've bypassed codesigning to open an app (doing right-click and open instead of double-clicking shows a prompt that allows a user to bypass the warning https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491 ), the app's whitelisted on your system. So I've historically messed up quite a few releases by signing with the wrong key, missing some bundled framework, etc, since my own work opens up fine on my own computer. I remember us vaguely talking about reproducible builds and verification, too. Guessing this ties in to the "removing signatures" part of what you said? Of course anything that happens during and after a codesign isn't reproducible for other users, but here are some notes about what `codesign` and the App Store do to built apps, particularly on iOS (but probably applicable to OSX too). https://github.com/OnionBrowser/iOS-OnionBrowser/issues/58 https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/641#issuecomment-782027… Essentially, codesign only touches executable binaries in the .app (see that second link for info on how the binary's segments get moved around) and also adds an SC_Info directory for codesign/DRM metadata. For App Store apps, only the SC_Info gets modified for different users for DRM. That makes it possible to actually verify an App Store app's integrity by removing that directory to check hashes -- https://github.com/OnionBrowser/iOS-OnionBrowser/releases/tag/v1.5.11 -- but you won't have this problem since you're not gonna go that route. The design (per that comment) doesn't seem to allow reversing the signing process easily due to DRM encryption of parts of the binary -- though I'm not clear on which parts are due to `codesign` locally versus magic that Apple performs on App Store-submitted applications. If the `codesign` by itself doesn't encrypt the binary (i.e. if it just rearranges the binary's segments & adds metadata & creates the metadata/DRM directory), it might be possible to reverse it. Could be worth someone exploring segment sizes/positions with `size` and `otool` http://www.objc.io/issues/6-build-tools/mach-o-executables/ to determine this for real. Ah holy shit, that is a LOT of words. But hope that helps and isn't too overwhelming. That's just about everything I know about this off the top of my head. Let me know if something isn't clear or if you run into any issues with the Apple account or something like that. Cheers, Mike Tigas Reporter/News Applications Developer, ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/ @mtigas | https://mike.tig.as/ | 0x6E0E9923 ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Mike Perry

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Proposal 257: Refactoring authorities and taking parts offline
by Nick Mathewson 27 Oct '15

27 Oct '15

Filename: 257-hiding-authorities.txt Title: Refactoring authorities and taking parts offline Authors: Nick Mathewson, Andrea Shepard Created: 2015-10-27 Status: Draft 1. Introduction Directory authorities are critical to the Tor network, and represent a DoS target to anybody trying to disable the network. This document describes a strategy for making directory authorities in general less vulnerable to DoS by separating the different parts of their functionality. 2. Design 2.1. The status quo This proposal is about splitting up the roles of directory authorities. But, what are these roles? Currently, directory authorities perform the following functions. Some of these functions require large amounts of bandwidth; I've noted that with a (BW). Some of these functions require a publicly known address; I've marked those with a (PUB). Some of these functions inevitably leak the location from which they are performed. I've marked those with a (LOC). Not everything in this list is something that needs to be done by an authority permanently! This list is, again, just what authorities do now. * Authorities receive uploaded server descriptors and extrainfo descriptors from regular Tor servers and from each other. (BW, PUB?) * Authorities periodically probe the routers they know about in order to determine whether they are running or not. By remembering the past behavior of nodes, they also build a view of each node's fractional uptime and mean time between failures. (LOC, unless we're clever) * Authorities perform the consensus protocol by: * Generating 'vote' documents describing their view of the network, along with a set of microdescriptors for later client use. * Uploading these votes to one another. * Computing a 'consensus' of these votes. * Authorities serve as a location for distributing consensus documents, descriptors, extrainfo documents, and microdescriptors... * To directory mirrors. (BW?, PUB?, LOC?) * To clients that do not yet know a directory mirror. (BW!!, PUB) These functions are tied to directory authorities, but done out-of-process: * Bandwidth measurement (BW) * Sybil detection * 'Guardiness' measurement, possibly. 2.2. Design goals Principally, we attempt to isolate the security-critical, high-resource, and availability-critical pieces of our directory infrastructure from one another. We would like to make the security-critical pieces of our infrastructure easy to relocate, and the communications between them easy to secure. We require that the Tor network remain able to bootstrap itself in the event of catastrophic failure. So, while we can _use_ a running Tor network to communicate, we should not _require_ that a running Tor network exist in order to perform the voting process. 2.3. Division of responsibility We propose dividing directory authority operations into these modules: ---------- ---------- -------------- ---------------- | Upload |======>| Voting |===>| Publishing |===>| Distribution | ---------- ---------- -------------- ---------------- I ^ I ----------- I ====>| Metrics |=== ----------- A number of 'upload' servers are responsible for receiving router descriptors. These are publicly known, and responsible for collecting descriptors. Information from these servers is used by 'metrics' modules (which check Tor servers for reliability and measure their history), and fed into the voting process. The voting process involves only communication (indirectly) from authorities to authorities, to produce a consensus and a set of microdescriptors. When voting is complete, consensuses, descriptors, and microdescriptors must be made available to the rest of the world. This is done by the 'publishing' module. The consensuses, descriptors, and mds are then taken up by the directory caches, and distributed. The rest of this proposal will describe means of communication between these modules. 3. The modules in more detail This section will outline possibilities for communication between the various parts of the system to isolate them. There will be plenty of "may"s and "could"s and "might"s here: these are possibilities, in need of further consideration. 3.1. Sending descriptors to the Upload module We retain the current mechanism: a set of well-known IP addresses with well-known OR keys to which each relay should upload a copy of its descriptors. The worst that a hostile upload server can do is to drop descriptors. (It could also generate large numbers of spurious descriptors in order to increase the load on the metrics system. But an attacker could do that without running an upload server) With respect to dropping, upload servers can use an anytrust model: so long as a single server receives and honestly reports descriptors to the rest of the system, those descriptors will arrive correctly. To avoid DoS attacks, we can require that any relay not previously known to an upload module perform some kind of a proof of work as it first registers itself. (Details TBD) If we're using TLS here, we should also consider a check-then-start TLS design as described in A.1 below. The location of Upload servers can change over time; they can be published in the consensus. (Note also that as an alternative, we could distribute this functionality across the whole network.) 3.2. Transferring descriptors to the metrics server and the voters The simplest option here would be for the authorities and metrics servers to mirror them using Tor. rsync-over-ssh-over-Tor is a possibility, if we don't feel like building more machinery. (We could use hidden services here, but it is probably okay for upload servers and to be known by the the voters and metrics.) A fallback to a non-Tor connection could be done manually, or could require explicit buy-in from the voter/metrics operator. 3.3. Transferring information from metrics server to voters The same approaches as 3.2 should work fine. 3.4. Communication between voters Voters can, we hope, communicate to each other over authenticated hidden services. But we'll need a fallback mechanism here. Another option is to have public ledgers available for voters to talk to anonymously. This is probably a better idea. We could re-use the upload servers for this purpose, perhaps. Giving voters each others' addresses seems like a bad idea. 3.5. Communication from voters to directory nodes We should design a flood-distribution mechanism for microdescriptors, listed descriptors, and consensuses so that authorities can each upload to a few targets anonymously, and have them propagate through the rest of the network. 4. Migration To support old clients and old servers, the current authority IP addresses should remain as Upload and Distribution points. The current authority identity keys keys should remain as the keys for voters. A.1. Check-then-start TLS Current TLS protocols are quite susceptible to denial-of-service attacks, with large asymmetries in resource consumption. (Client sends junk, forcing server to perform private-key operation on junk.) We could hope for a good TLS replacement to someday emerge, or for TLS to improve its properties. But as a replacement, I suggest that we wrap TLS in a preliminary challenge-response protocol to establish that the use is authorized before we allow the TLS handshake to begin. (We shouldn't do this for all the TLS in Tor: only for the cases where we want to restrict the users of a given TLS server.)

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