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TOP SECRET BULLETIN ABOUT THE RACCOON EFFECT
by The23rd Raccoon 24 Dec '20

24 Dec '20

Was the Raccoon ACTUALLY RIGHT after ALL THESE YEARS: Proof of a SOLO CUTTING EDGE PARADIGM SHIFT, or an ALIEN INTERVENTION to EXPOSE ACADEMIC CONSPIRACY? by Raccoon23 (You'll have to excuse my caps lock: I am going for a world record high score on the crackpot index[1,2]. Cypherpunk lore has a loooong history of high scores in this index, so I really do have to work very hard to get every point I reasonably can. However, I'm already at 226 points in the title, by my count. Plus I've got this[3] going for me, which is nice.) But enough about that. Let's get to the meat[4]! Recent advances in traffic analysis defenses have finally proved that my controversial but revolutionary theories[5,6] are valid, overturning decades of theories about traffic analysis attacks against anonymity networks! Ok ok, so I might have made a mistake in the math[7]. But I'm just a Raccoon who reads discarded academic research papers in a dumpster. While I have been highly educated through my dumpster schooling, one can't expect raccoons to do math correctly. Such math is best left to others who can properly express my theory in terms of equations. Others like Panchenko, Pulls, Danezis, Kadianakis, et al; and maybe Perry. (But probably not Perry.) I have worked on this problem *alone* for many years, while I was in or around many highly respected mental institutions. I was even cautioned to take a break, by my therapeutic advisors. Probably because I was getting too close to the TRUTH! However, as we shall see, this was not entirely a solo effort. This leaves only one possibility: ALIEN INTERVENTION[8]. But before we get to that, much has happened since my two posts on this topic, over a decade ago. So let's recap: My two posts were written in opposition to the orthodox view that anonymity networks would always be 100% broken by traffic correlation attacks, and so therefore side channels such as cryptographic tagging attacks were not worth including in Tor's threat model. Paul Syverson, the famous self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy of onion routing, argued most vigorously against my points, carefully trying to correct me. But I would not be dissuaded! (I love you Paul! Just scoring crackpot points.) Paul's clout with the "scientific establishment" is clearly very strong. Paul has had a distinguished career, being named in The Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers List in 2012[9], and named an ACM Fellow in 2014[10]. As evidence of his obvious involvement in the scientific conspiracy against me, consider that my original post was cut short "somehow" on the official Tor Project mailing list archive[11], compared to the original[5]. This is also not the first time a famous thinker has suppressed an idea that they secretly believed in. Elon Musk, renowned and respected former proponent of the Simulation Hypothesis[12], clearly knows that optimized versions of the Alcubierre Drive[13] are realizable using excess exotic matter accumulated during particle accelerator "downtime". Downtime, I might add, that is facilitated by a Tor Project volunteer administrator who goes by the codename 'weasel', who subsequently faked his own death to avoid implication[14]. These are the kinds of people we are dealing with here. They will stop at NOTHING to conceal the TRUTH! Elon has since begun a cover-up of the Simulation Hypothesis[15], presumably because someone collected his bounty to help him escape The Matrix[16]. Despite all of this being so obviously exposed, Elon still pursues his wasteful and foolish rocketry! Merely because he likes lighting things on fire[17], digging tunnels[18], and playing with electricity[19]. Elon, the raccoons can relate -- we just wish you would come clean, and admit you did it all for the tunnel rave... Anyway, I digress. Some time after my post, I would learn from my daily dumpster deliveries that Website Traffic Fingerprinting had became a fad in academic research circles. Website Traffic Fingerprinting is a form of traffic analysis that uses machine learning to recognize website access over Tor, by observing only the encrypted traffic patterns entering the Tor network. For ethical and practical reasons, these attacks are performed in lab conditions on researcher generated web crawls, often using individual static web page access, rather than involving interactive user web browsing or other concurrent Tor activity common to real-world Tor usage. Mike Perry, a suspiciously private employee of the Tor Project, critiqued the limitations of these lab conditions, and questioned the accuracy of many of these attacks in realistic settings[20]. Perry and Kadianakis also developed a framework for building traffic analysis defenses for Tor[21]. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, a long series of attacks and defenses ensued, and the advent of deep learning[22] caused many to believe that defenses against deep learning based Website Traffic Fingerprinting attacks were as hopeless as trying to defend against end-to-end correlation. I watched from my dumpster as these hidebound reactionary responses to traffic analysis defenses continued for many years, seemingly trying to bait me out of hiding, to no avail[23]. (To be honest, I don't even know what hidebound means. I'm just a raccoon. But saying that gets me crackpot points. And it totally happened!) However, I was eventually delighted to see that some recent advances by others had arrived in my dumpster, finally allowing my ideas to have vindication! Recently, Panchenko et al found traffic splitting to be highly effective against state of the art Website Traffic Fingerprinting attacks based on deep learning[24]. Concurrently, Tobias Pulls used Perry and Kadianakis's padding machines in an optimization problem, using a Genetic Algorithm to evolve optimal padding machines against deep learning classifiers, for use in defense against Website Traffic Fingerprinting[25]. With this result, we have finally entered the age of the machines versus the machines. Raccoon math, while groundbreaking, is no longer necessary. Both of these defenses were highly successful on their own. However, with the combination of traffic splitting and cover traffic defenses, Tor will be on the CUTTING EDGE of making a PARADIGM SHIFT in its threat model, to tackle the hardest problem of all: END-TO-END TRAFFIC CORRELATION. Allow me to present my case: Einstien once posited that time was relative. While Einstien's theory of relativity was fundamentally misguided, time is relative. Relative to the problem of both end-to-end traffic correlation, and Website Traffic Fingerprinting. Einstien, in his later years, even alluded to quantum observation correlation as "spooky action at a distance", setting precedent for the connection that I have known all along to be true. Einstien might not have been as insightful as me, but for all his fumbling, Einstien was right about one thing: correlation attacks *are* spooky. Metadata kills people[26]. (Sadly, that is not a joke...) Unfortunately, Einstien's results were incomplete, and his groping to unify these problems was not properly understood by any, except yours truly. Deep learning was so successful at Website Traffic Fingerprinting that most researchers did not even bother to provide their deep learning classifiers with time-based features. They claimed their classifiers were accurate enough without considering time at all! We now know this to be false, thanks to the independent discoveries of new defenses by the teams of Panchenko and Pulls. As it turns out, quantum mechanics is also fundamentally misguided. We now know that the universe appears to be made up of fragments of energy at a fundamental level[27]. In fact, after all these years, raccoons and their allies (alien or otherwise) seem to be almost as close to unifying physics as we are to addressing end-to-end correlation in Tor! Indeed, once time is included as a feature, deep learning based Website Traffic Fingerprinting attacks will effectively be correlating the timing and traffic patterns of websites to their representations in its neural model. This model comparison is extremely similar to how end-to-end correlation compares the timing and traffic patterns of Tor entrance traffic to Tor exit traffic. In fact, deep learning classifiers have already shown success in correlating end-to-end traffic on Tor[28]. Some say that Long Term Statistical Disclosure (LTSD) attacks will still always win the end-to-end correlation game against anonymity networks, in the fullness of time[29]. However, LTSD attacks are only a theory. And much like quantum mechanics, relativity, and LSD, these attacks also warp one's perception of reality, time, and space. All of these theories are fundamentally misguided. LTSD attacks predict that over time, correlation gradually leaks enough information to fully deanonymize users of anonymity networks. But also much like quantum mechanics, they fail to fully define the mechanism. Consider this thought experiment (feel free to use whatever mind expanding devices you have at hand to assist you): LTSD assumes that an adversary has complete high resolution information of all traffic that enters and exits an anonymity network. Additionally, LTSD assumes that an adversary has identifiers available to properly track traffic streams on *each* side of the correlation, over the full duration of observation and long-term correlation. Several real-world effects undermine these assumptions. Widespread deployment of HTTPS[30], the trend towards encrypted DNS and SNI, shared cloud infrastructure, and the practical infeasibility of full Internet-wide traffic record keeping, all reduce the ability of the adversary to track repeated connections over time. Additionally, defenses that multiplex traffic entering the Tor network with traffic splitting and cover traffic undermine the adversary's ability to fully determine traffic time and quantity information that pertains to specific connections. All of this means that the LTSD adversary, much like Einstien's light-riding cowboy and Schrodinger's cat, remain an idealized approximation of reality. Despite the results of the DeepCorr experiment[28], from this thought experiment, it is clear that correlation can be mitigated, perhaps even pushing long-term correlation attacks into time durations that allow for many practical use cases, even web browsing. As we know from the historical record[31], aliens need anonymity too[32]. And when their hyper-dimensional cats join with all of the raccoons[33] and other creatures who are using Tor on a regular basis, the quantity of co-incident events (and unmatched pairs due to to incomplete observation) will rise high enough to cause LTSD to require larger and larger amounts of observation time, to perform effective correlation. This by itself is a huge win. We can now say with certainty that The Raccoon Effect has thoroughly discromulated correlation attacks. (Discromulation is my term to describe what this kind of defense does. Most interestingly, I am forced into winning this crackpot point. Because deep learning is an opaque machine generated attack, and because the GA-optimized defense is also machine generated, it is actually impossible to precisely describe the complete behaviors of either one, other than with the resulting model definitions themselves! Brave new world.) Now, what about alien intervention? Well, assuming we do not consider the AI that participated in this work to be alien: if aliens did intervene, none would argue the discromulating conflugruity of The Raccoon Effect. Unfortunately however, I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations[34], at this time[35]. But that's not all! Since the circuit padding framework is implemented in Tor, this means that it is covered by Tor's bug bounty. While research papers that break padding defenses are not covered by the bounty (especially if those defenses are not actually deployed), there *is* in fact prize money for any flaws found in the framework that could lead to code execution, or deanonymization[36]. In conclusion: Here I am, setting a world record high score on the crackpot index (despite many admirable high scores by previous cypherpunks), and I was RIGHT ALL ALONG. I deserve a Nobel Prize for this work. But I do not expect to get one. I expect the brownshirts and Nazis embedded in the scientific establishment to continue to work hard to suppress my TRUTH. Even the crackpot index itself is involved in this conspiracy of scientific suppression. John Baez, the creator of the crackpot index, would surely confirm this, if he was not also part of the conspiracy against me! I have included him on CC, just in case he would like to recant his suppression of my original thinking, before his show trial. Like Galileo, I will cede no ground in this Inquisition! In fact, much like myself, even Newton struggled through a pandemic[37], and prevailed. We are more alike than you know. Newton tossed apples to many a raccoon in his garden. That's how we taught him to poorly approximate gravity (even though his misguided and simple calculus was barely up to the task). In these tough times, it is very satisfying to finally have vindication. As the Base Rate Fallacy showed all those years ago: The Raccoon Effect is real. THEY are watching; but WE are Legion[38]. Unfortunately, the reproducibility crisis in science is also real. More than ten years later, it is *still* often hard to reproduce, confirm, and compare results across the various papers that end up in my dumpster. Venues that do not have artifact archival policies are, in fact, on the verge of becoming shams. I am glad that some venues, and some researchers, are recanting the old ways[39,40]. The paper is not the only product of good research! P.S. You'll have to keep this all much more secret than I did. I don't want anyone to steal these ideas; the aliens might get upset. 2020 is not over! P.P.S. This sentence gets me #4. (As a liar's paradox[41]). Some say this puts me in a superposition of both getting and not getting #4, and I inherently can't get those points in this way. But I say that should get me double points! (And thus earn more points for #5). Gotta collect 'em all. P.P.P.S. At 1004 points on the crackpot index, I believe this post is now the highest scoring publication with a valid novel idea that has been written, to date[2]. P.P.P.P.S. Fucking bored as fuck during this fucking pandemic. Fuck![42] 1. https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/4r05wh/has_anyone_with_a_high_crackp… 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines 4. http://www.stinkymeat.net/ 5. https://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Mar-2012/msg00019.html - Raccoon23 Post1 6. https://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Sep-2008/msg00016.html - Raccoon23 Post2 7. https://conspicuouschatter.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/the-base-rate-fallacy-a… 8. https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/speakers/1242.en.html 9. https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/syverson_5067587 10. https://web.archive.org/web/20121130072122/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/art… 11. https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2008-September/002493.html 12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis#The_simulation_argument 13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive 14. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247 - Weasel takes down LHC 15. https://www.slashgear.com/elon-musk-has-banned-hot-tub-talks-about-simulate… 16. https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2016/10/13/elon-musk-and-friends-a… 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLcma0YyzhY - Elon Musk Flame Thrower 18. https://www.yogonet.com/international/noticias/2020/12/07/55695-boring-comp… 19. https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tesla-electric-jet-3-4-years-away 20. https://blog.torproject.org/critique-website-traffic-fingerprinting-attacks 21. https://github.com/torproject/tor/blob/master/doc/HACKING/CircuitPaddingDev… 22. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.02265.pdf - Deep Fingerprinting Tor 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvjMr6DU7C8 - Raccoon call 24. https://www.comsys.rwth-aachen.de/fileadmin/papers/2020/2020-delacadena-tra… 25. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.13471 - Pulls GA Defense 26. https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-we-kill-people-… 27. https://www.full-thesis.net/fragments-of-energy-not-waves-or-particles-may-… 28. https://people.cs.umass.edu/~amir/papers/CCS18-DeepCorr.pdf 29. https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/statistical-disclosure.pdf 30. https://transparencyreport.google.com/https/overview?hl=en 31. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando#Characters 32. https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2006/Fahrplan/attachments/1167-Spea… 33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSRfIMjvtFk - Raccoons and cats <3 34. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/27/politics/pentagon-ufo-videos/index.html 35. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weird-news/former-israeli-space-security-chief… 36. https://hackerone.com/torproject 37. https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/coronavirus/during-a-pandemic-isaac-newton-h… 38. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofp26_oc4CA - Raccoons are Legion 39. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/artifact-evaluation-info… 40. https://petsymposium.org/artifacts.php 41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox 42. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04_rIuVc_qM - WTF For Karsten: https://cs5.livemaster.ru/storage/3a/1f/1449eb23f3c3b318ab4960815fn4--water…

2 2

Two postdoc positions in Meta-data Privacy Systems and Networks at University of Edinburgh
by ELAHI Tariq 24 Dec '20

24 Dec '20

Hello all, I am looking for two post-docs to join two projects in the theme of Meta-data Privacy Systems and Networks. The post-docs are homed in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh where, under my supervision, we will investigate meta-data and data privacy techniques as building blocks/primitives to realize an “engineered privacy layer” that can be embedded into the Internet and communications networks in general. The post-docs will be a part of---and have the opportunity to interact and potentially collaborate with---the Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Trust group with over 15 core faculty members and 40+ Post-docs, PhD students, and affiliated faculty spanning a broad range of theoretical and applied topics in security, privacy, and trust. For more about the group please see: edin.ac/3mIDdqN. If you would like to have a casual chat to find out more before applying or have any questions please get in touch with me (t.elahi(a)ed.ac.uk) To learn more about my research interests please see: edin.ac/2KUmT93. Early applications will be considered as they arrive. The deadline for both positions is 15/1/2021 17:00 GMT. Some brief information about the two projects with links to further details follow: 1) "Integrating Meta-data Privacy into Networked Applications through ‘Add-On’ Anonymous Communication Networks" The aim of this project is to investigate how effectively and efficiently anonymous communication networks (ACN) primitives (at the network and applications layers) can act as “add-ons” between applications that do not have privacy built-in by design (non-PbD apps) and the Internet at large. This project will rigorously develop and extend on the current folk wisdom that to add anonymity or privacy properties to a non-PbD system, the addition of sending all traffic through an ACN is sufficient. It will provide a nuanced and technical approach to integrating anonymous networks, and the primitives they are built on, to systems that are not originally privacy-aware. The approach will be to investigate and extend privacy primitives that enable routing, path selection, and traffic shaping and compose the result into an “engineered privacy-layer”. Duration: 18 Months Start: March 1st, 2021 (flexible) More Information: edin.ac/3rnDdAb (apply by 15/1/2021) 2) "Well-behaved Anonymous Communication Networks" Mass surveillance of email and web browsing traffic is a critical and growing threat to individual and at-risk groups' online security and privacy. In response, Anonymous Communication Networks (ACNs) like Tor and Mix networks secure communications on the Internet against even the most sophisticated and powerful adversaries. However, it is a challenge to optimally tune ACNs by the security non-expert system administrator in real world settings. Misconfiguration may lead to catastrophic failures of privacy and performance degradation that will erode trust in ACNs and hamper their adoption. This project will investigate novel approaches combining engineering principles and PETS techniques to designing, tuning, and operating ACNs at scale. The resulting systems and techniques will contribute towards our “engineered privacy-layer” vision. Duration 24 Months Start: March 1st (flexible) More Information: edin.ac/34AKDpZ (apply by 15/1/2021) Stay safe and be healthy, Tariq Elahi Assistant Professor School of Informatics University of Edinburgh UK The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

1 0

Self coded GUI for Tor Windows Relay Software
by Keifer Bly 22 Dec '20

22 Dec '20

Hi Tor Developers, This is a project I have been working on which allows users to run relays on Windows with ease. Made this for volunteers who want to run relays, but only have Windows. See here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpk6yvUWQqU Features: Easy configuring of tor Auto installation of tor or upgrade to newest version at launch Start relay when OS starts Keep tor software up to date automatically Drawbacks: Only supports vanilla bridges currently. Configures Windows Firewall to allow relay traffic automatically, but can’t auto configure any other firewalls. Tested and working. I saw a video saying tor could use more Windows developers, so I developed this. I am happy to send the source code if you wish. Would be cool to have this published on tor project website under OS instructions for running relays. --Keifer

1 0

Debian signing keys
by enrollado 21 Dec '20

21 Dec '20

I'm getting invalid signing key messages on the Debian Buster repos. Has something changed? Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

1 0

ARTI
by Zaphoid 12 Dec '20

12 Dec '20

Greetings Tor-Dev, I've watched Nick's presentation on State of the Onion and have read the "Tor in 2021" blog post searching for more details on A Rust Tor Implementation (ARTI). I think Rust is a fascinating language and looking to further my knowledge of it and Tor's internals as they are developed. I understand that some Rust implementation is available in the source repository. What I am looking for is a road-map or planned outcome. Could anyone advise if the intent is to completely re-write the Tor client in Rust? Or, is the project's goal to rewrite specific components? Z

2 1

My app which makes running tor relays on Windows Very Simple
by Keifer Bly 12 Dec '20

12 Dec '20

Hi all, So this is a software peice I have been developing which makes running tor relays on Windows very easy. All the user needs to do is write their torrc. The app installs tor, and configures all once the torrc is written by itself. Here is a video showing the app: Features Automatic Tor download and installation (via Choclatey) Type the torrc file, and the app configures and points tor there for you. Attempted automatic firewall configuration. Automatic creation of log file. Cons: Currently only directly support vanilla bridges. OBFS4 will have to be manually downloaded / configured. ATTEMPTED firewall auto configuration. It auto adds a rule to Windows Defender Firewall to allow the traffic, but can't configure router firewalls, etc. Let know what you think. I have successfully gotten tor up and running through this. If chocolatey changes their install scripts, this will need to be updated. I can send the source code if interested. Programming Language: C#/.Net Tor Windows App.mp4 <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZJ4EKXbu2Clyzc5WdNdxSWquswhdvSTJ/view?usp=…> --Keifer

1 0

Trouble with onionperf visualize and S61 performance experiments
by George Kadianakis 07 Dec '20

07 Dec '20

Hello Karsten, hope you are doing well! I've been working on the S61 performance experiments [0] and I would appreciate some help with onionperf. I have done various onionperf measurements using something the following command: $ onionperf measure -i --tgen ~/tgen/build/src/tgen --tor ~/onionperf/tor/src/app/tor --drop-guards 10 I put each of the measurements on a different directory and now I want to analyze them and derive the CDF-TTFB graphs etc. I attempted doing that using the following calls: $ onionperf analyze --tgen ./tgen-client/onionperf.tgen.log --torctl ./tor-client/onionperf.torctl.log $ onionperf visualize --data onionperf.analysis.json.xz "test" Unfortunately, the 'visualize' call can fail for the attached 'onionperf-mbps.json.xz': $ onionperf visualize --data onionperf.analysis.json.xz "Test Measurements" 2020-11-03 15:51:31 1604411491.540736 [onionperf] [INFO] loading analysis results from /user/tmp/onionperf/analysis/onionperf.analysis.json.xz 2020-11-03 15:51:31 1604411491.577864 [onionperf] [INFO] done! 2020-11-03 15:51:31 1604411491.586845 [onionperf] [INFO] NumExpr defaulting to 8 threads. /user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py:251: UserWarning: Attempting to set identical left == right == -1e-06 results in singular transformations; automatically expanding. /user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py:251: UserWarning: Attempting to set identical left == right == -1e-06 results in singular transformations; automatically expanding. Traceback (most recent call last): File "/user/.local/bin/onionperf", line 4, in <module> __import__('pkg_resources').run_script('OnionPerf==0.8', 'onionperf') File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 650, in run_script self.require(requires)[0].run_script(script_name, ns) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1453, in run_script exec(script_code, namespace, namespace) File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 622, in <module> File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 382, in main File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 522, in visualize File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py", line 48, in plot_all File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py", line 205, in __plot_throughput_ecdf File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py", line 235, in __draw_ecdf File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 5000, in dropna raise KeyError(list(np.compress(check, subset))) KeyError: ['mbps'] Then for another onionperf run (attached as 'onionperf-44028.json.xz') it gave me a different error: $ onionperf visualize --data onionperf.analysis.json.xz "Test Measurements" 2020-11-03 15:50:03 1604411403.946028 [onionperf] [INFO] loading analysis results from /user/tmp/onionperf/analysis/onionperf.analysis.json.xz 2020-11-03 15:50:03 1604411403.976088 [onionperf] [INFO] done! Traceback (most recent call last): File "/user/.local/bin/onionperf", line 4, in <module> __import__('pkg_resources').run_script('OnionPerf==0.8', 'onionperf') File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 650, in run_script self.require(requires)[0].run_script(script_name, ns) File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pkg_resources/__init__.py", line 1453, in run_script exec(script_code, namespace, namespace) File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 622, in <module> File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 382, in main File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/EGG-INFO/scripts/onionperf", line 522, in visualize File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py", line 38, in plot_all File "/user/.local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/OnionPerf-0.8-py3.8.egg/onionperf/visualization.py", line 129, in __extract_data_frame KeyError: '44028' Because of the two errors above I'm unable to proceed with producing any results. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? Is there any other data you might need to help me with this? Thanks a lot! [0]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/roadmaps/CoreTor/Performa… https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40157

2 6

Resolving TXT records
by Jorropo 27 Nov '20

27 Nov '20

Hi, I'm trying to port go-libp2p <https://libp2p.io/> on tor. The problem is with the dnslink features. Basically libp2p addresses are not always friendly to use so libp2p allows to store them in dns TXT records. But when I try to resolve a TXT record over Tor this errors : tor --DNSPort 127.53.53.53 & host -v -t any jorropo.net Trying "jorropo.net" ;; Connection to 127.53.53.53#53(127.53.53.53) for jorropo.net failed: connection refused. # I'm pretty confident the dns option of Tor is working because I can resolve A records. Is this expected or I am doing something wrong?

2 1

Tor Browser 10.0.5 not functional on Fedora Rawhide
by Ian Laurie 24 Nov '20

24 Nov '20

Regular Firefox became briefly non-functional on Fedora Rawhide due to the following (now resolved) bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1891234 The issue was that all tabs immediately crashed making the browser unusable. I believe Tor is now suffering from the same issue. -- Ian Laurie

2 1

tor relay process health data for operators (controlport)
by nusenu 16 Nov '20

16 Nov '20

Hi, every now and then I'm in contact with relay operators about the "health" of their relays. Following these 1:1 discussions and the discussion on tor-relays@ I'd like to rise two issues with you (the developers) with the goal to help improve relay operations and end user experience in the long term: 1) DNS (exits only) 2) tor relay health data 1) DNS ------ Current situation: Arthur Edelstein provides public measurements to tor exit relay operators via his page at: https://arthuredelstein.net/exits/ This page is updated once daily. the process to use that data looks like this: - first they watch Arthur's measurement results - if their failure rate is non-zero they try to tweak/improve/change their setup - wait for another 24 hours (next measurement) This is a somewhat suboptimal and slow feedback loop and is probably also less accurate and less valuable data when compared to the data the tor process can provide. Suggestion for improvement: Exposes the following DNS status information via tor's controlport to help debug and detect DNS issues on exit relays: (total numbers since startup) - amount of DNS queries send to the resolver - amount of DNS queries send to the resolver due to a RESOLVE request - DNS queries send to resolver due to a reverse RESOLVE request - amount of queries that did not result in any answer from the resolver - breakdown of number of responses by response code (RCODE) https://www.iana.org/assignments/dns-parameters/dns-parameters.xhtml#dns-pa… - max amount of DNS queries send per curcuit If this causes a significant performance impact this feature should be disabled by default. 2) general relay health metrics -------------------------------- Compared to other server daemons (webserver, DNS server, ..) tor provides little data for operators to detect operational issues and anomalies. I'd suggest to provide the following stats via the control port: (most of them are already written to logfiles by default but not accessible via the controlport as far as I've seen) - total amount of memory used by the tor process - amount of currently open circuits - circuit handshake stats (TAP / NTor) DoS mitigation stats - amount of circuits killed with too many cells - amount of circuits rejected - marked addresses - amount of connections closed - amount of single hop clients refused - amount of closed/failed circuits broken down by their reason value https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/tor-spec.txt#n1402 https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/control-spec.txt#n1994 - amount of closed/failed OR connections broken down by their reason value https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/control-spec.txt#n2205 If this causes a significant performance impact this feature should be disabled by default. cell stats - extra info cell stats as defined in: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n1072 This data should be useful to answer the following questions: - High level questions: Is the tor relay healthy? - is it hitting any resource limits? - is the tor process under unusual load? - why is tor using more memory? - is it slower than usual at handling circuits? - can the DNS resolver handle the amount of DNS queries tor is sending it? This data could help prevent errors from occurring or provide additional data when trying to narrow down issues. When it comes to the question: **Is it "safe" to make this data accessible via the controlport?** I assume it is safe for all information that current versions of tor writes to logfiles or even publishes as part of its extra info descriptor. Should tor provide this or similar data I'm planing to write scripts for operators to make use of that data (for example a munin plugin that connects to tor's controlport). I'm happy to help write updates for control-spec should these features seem reasonable to you. Looking forward to hearing your feedback. nusenu -- https://twitter.com/nusenu_ https://mastodon.social/@nusenu

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