- tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

GSoC: Revamp GetTor - new design
by Israel Leiva 22 May '14

22 May '14

Hi all. One of the decision I've had to take during the community bonding was if rewrite GetTor or fix the current code. IMO the best approach is to rewrite it, and I've been working on a proposal design [1]. I'm currently discussing this new design with my mentors, and I'd really appreciate any other feedback from the dev community. Obviously, several parts of the current code will be reused; what will change is how is organized. Also, there are some things that are not yet covered and need further discussion, such as packages checksums and syncronization. [1] https://github.com/ileiva/gettor/tree/master/spec Regards. -- israel

1 0

A Child's Garden of Pluggable Transports
by David Fifield 21 May '14

21 May '14

Have you ever wondered what makes the Tor protocol fingerprintable, and makes pluggable transports necessary? Have you wondered how obfs3 obscures byte patterns in Tor? What a flash proxy WebSocket connection actually looks like, and why it defeats IP blocking but not DPI? Then I have the wiki page for you: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/AChildsGardenOfPluggableT… It's a visualization of different pluggable transports, meant to be an aid to understanding. At the top is an ordinary Tor handshake, with some fingerprintable data fields highlighted. The following sections, one for each transport, show how those fields are hidden--or not. I tried to demonstrate aspects of different transports that I think are hard to intuit, such as what flash proxy rendezvous looks like, and how transports look under the encrypted layer that is visible to a censor. There are sections for obfs3, ScrambleSuit, FTE, flash proxy, meek, and Bananaphone. The page is missing a few more from https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports. If you know how to run any of those transports, and you know an effective way to visualize it, please add it to the page. David Fifield

2 1

obfsproxy getting scramblesuit password from file in unmanaged mode
by irregulator＠riseup.net 20 May '14

20 May '14

Hey all, when running obfsproxy with scramblesuit in unmanaged mode (e.g. to obfuscate non-Tor traffic) the UniformDH password is passed in command line like this: obfsproxy scramblesuit --password=W3ECD5GOYU5AAW4G35GSH5QXIHSRBU2X The problem with this is that the password is visible in the system's process list. Do you think it would make sense to add an argument like "--password-file", so as scramblesuit can fetch the password from a file? Any caveats? Although this is not related to the Tor ecosystem, i think it would be useful. Cheers, Alex

2 1

Reminder: tor development meetings every Wednesday, 1900UTC
by Nick Mathewson 20 May '14

20 May '14

Hi, all! Here's your regular reminder for the weekly IRC meeting for people working on the program "tor". (This won't cover all the other programs developed under the Tor umbrella.) The next meeting time will be: Wednesday May 21, 19:00 UTC. (That's 3pm EDT and 12:00 noon PDT.) As usual, we'll do it on the #tor-dev IRC channel, unless the meeting turns out to be too disruptive for the rest of the channel or vice versa. I've seen a drop-off in the number of people coming since I stopped sending these out weekly, so I think now's a fine time to start doing them weekly again. cheers, -- Nick

1 0

Software Testing
by Lachlan Schahinger 20 May '14

20 May '14

Hello, For a University Project we have been asked to test software, I personally would like to test parts of the TOR project via methods of unit testing and/or fuzz testing. I was wondering if there are any specific areas of the software that need testing that may present results? Thanks,Lachy

1 0

Code review request for bug #9701
by michael＠schloh.com 18 May '14

18 May '14

Hello list, If anybody's feeling particularly friendly, then it would be nice of you to do the favour of reviewing the proposed solution to bug #9701: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9701 It relates to clipboard turds of the Tor Browser in violation of the premise of disk avoidance by design. The code in question is attached to the bug report. Georg (GK) has signalled interest, in case you want to coordinate. Thanks in advance! Cheers, Michael

3 5

Metrics tarballs now available as .tar.xz rather than .tar.bz2
by Karsten Loesing 17 May '14

17 May '14

Hello all, we switched the compression format for metrics tarballs. They are now available as .tar.xz (compressed with `xz -9`), with the previous format being .tar.bz2 (compressed with `bzip2 -1`). The effect is that the total size of metrics tarballs shrinks from 212G to 33G. The savings in disk space and bandwidth were too tempting, even though compression and decompression are going to cost some more CPU and memory. The data page now contains links to .tar.xz tarballs: https://metrics.torproject.org/data.html However, the .tar.bz2 tarballs will still be provided for another two months until July 17, 2014. This includes already existing and newly created tarballs. All the best, Karsten

2 1

Cute Otter == Tahoe-LAFS + Tor?
by David Stainton 16 May '14

16 May '14

Hi, What is going on with that cute otter hidden service publishing project? What do people think about having it use the Tahoe-LAFS Onion Grid and lafs-rpg instead of telling users to run their own webservers? Tahoe-LAFS could help to greatly increase the security and censorship resistance of the data being published. If the people involved with this were interested in using Tahoe-LAFS as the data store then I would be more than happy to help out with this. (I don't do any web development at all) Sincerely, David

3 3

Collecting data to demonstrate TCP ISN-based port knocking
by Christian Grothoff 15 May '14

15 May '14

Hi all, some of you might remember a project called "Knock", which implements a variant of port-knocking in the Linux kernel that can be used to check the authenticity of arbitrary TCP connections and even can do integrity checking of the TCP payload by using a pre-shared key. Knock started as a student project which was presented during the Tor developer meeting at Technische Universität München last July. This was also where Jake added his two cents to help the project to move on. We still hope that Knock will be eventually useful for Tor (think: bridges), but could use your help to collect data to help convince the Linux people to adopt the latest patch. As Knock uses two fields in the TCP header in order to hide information and we explicitly want to be compatible with machines sitting in typical home networks, we need to make sure that this information doesn't get corrupted by the majority of NAT boxes out there. We thus created a program which tests if Knock would work in your environment. It would be great if some of you were able to execute the program on your machines in order to help us to get an estimation of if Knock one day could be used in a large scale. You can find sources, binaries and a more elaborate description here: https://gnunet.org/knock_nat_tester Technical details about Knock and a (somewhat outdated) research paper as well as kernel patches are provided here: https://gnunet.org/knock Best, Julian & Christian

1 0

Collecting data to demonstrate TCP ISN-based port knocking
by Julian Kirsch 14 May '14

14 May '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi all, some of you might remember a project called "Knock", which implements a variant of port-knocking in the Linux kernel that can be used to check the authenticity of arbitrary TCP connections and even can do integrity checking of the TCP payload by using a pre-shared key. Knock started as a student project which was presented during the Tor developer meeting at Technische Universität München last July. This was also where Jake added his two cents to help the project to move on. We still hope that Knock will be eventually useful for Tor (think: bridges), but could use your help to collect data to help convince the Linux people to adopt the latest patch. As Knock uses two fields in the TCP header in order to hide information and we explicitly want to be compatible with machines sitting in typical home networks, we need to make sure that this information doesn't get corrupted by the majority of NAT boxes out there. We thus created a program which tests if Knock would work in your environment. It would be great if some of you were able to execute the program on your machines in order to help us to get an estimation of if Knock one day could be used in a large scale. You can find sources, binaries and a more elaborate description here: https://gnunet.org/knock_nat_tester Technical details about Knock and a (somewhat outdated) research paper as well as kernel patches are provided here: https://gnunet.org/knock Best, Julian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1 iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJTc+ytAAoJENwkOWttRRA4X/MH/3rDq/szoRTxQDNa8TlBQqNv 3Lcsze55XTpaYY2k9gwK5lKUXar4Ngy6v4i+SOjSrC/gZur5j/g/8LhKy5XdvHdl zXXV2+3ubkK+lWzOq0JP3rJ8lKDAW3Lor0EnVEmZv45+fpgQIbyTKvmEUaiU0l5l A10wDsXjvWTApl+S52pga2qK0g397hn+Y99843PRl8KSxpFDP0t4vTBYBZmLYbMT o7rfoe5BiUtogAgvLdlJ4GlQUrHiH4s6QyQb5/obcGBaN1V8ydkjH0pw6yHR4PTD D5IB7ZYadwi+9k1UyQbAwTCs9+6omiPzN0ugeTdcffzQio2eZUzPOQPyS9vRPwM= =gXcK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

1 0