- tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

Tor proposal status (December 2013)
by Nick Mathewson 28 Jan '14

28 Jan '14

This list of open Tor proposals is based on one I sent out last month[0], based on the one I did in June of last year[1], based on the one I did in May[2] of the year before. If you're looking for something to review, think about, or comment on: Review 212 (using older consensuses) or 215 (obsoleting consensus methods) if you understand the directory system even a little bit; they are quite simple. Review 219 if you're a DNS geek, or you'd like Tor to work better with more DNS types. Review 220 (ed25519 identity keys) if you like designing signature things, if you have good ideas about future-proofing key type migration, or if you care about making Tor servers' identity keys stronger. Review 223 (ACE handshake) if you're a cryptographer, or a cryptography implementer, and you'd like an even faster replacement for the ntor handshake. Review 224 if you want to look through a big, complex protocol with a lot of pieces. Also review it if you care about hidden services and making them better. Review something else if you want to take a possibly good idea that needs more momentum and promote it, fix it up, or finally kill it off. Finally: if you've sent something to tor-dev or to me that should have a proposal number, but doesn't have one yet, please ping me again to remind me! [0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-November/005798.html [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-June/003641.html [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2011-May/002637.html **NOTE**: The dates after each paragraph indicate when I last revised the paragraph. 127 Relaying dirport requests to Tor download site / website The idea here was to make it easier to fetch and learn about Tor by making it easy for relays to automatically act as proxies to the Tor website. It needs more discussion, and there are some significant details to work out. It's not at all clear whether this is actually a good idea or not. Probably, there are better choices when it comes to distributing software and updates. (11/2013) 131 Help users to verify they are using Tor [NEEDS-REVISION] This one is not a crazy idea, but I marked it as needs-revision since it doesn't seem to work so well with our current designs. It seems mostly superseded by proposal 211. (11/2013) 132 A Tor Web Service For Verifying Correct Browser Configuration This proposal was meant to give users a way to see if their browser and privoxy (yes, it was a while ago) are correctly configured by running a local webserver on 127.0.0.1. I'm not sure the status here. Generally, I'm skeptical of designs that run webservers on localhost, since they become a target for cross-site attacks. (11/2013) 133 Incorporate Unreachable ORs into the Tor Network This proposal had an idea for letting ORs that can only make outgoing connections still relay data usefully in the network. It's something we should keep in mind, and it's a pretty neat idea, but it radically changes the network topology. Anybody who wants to analyze new network topologies should definitely have a look. (5/2011) 140 Provide diffs between consensuses This proposal describes a way to transmit less directory traffic by sending only differences between consensuses, rather than the consensuses themselves. It is mainly languishing for lack of an appropriately licensed, well-written, very small, pure-C implementation of the "diff" and "patch" algorithms. (The good diffs seem to be GPL (which we can't use without changing Tor's license), or spaghetti code, or not easily usable as a library, or not written in C, or very large, or some combination of those.) (5/2011) 141 Download server descriptors on demand The idea of this proposal was for clients to only download the consensus, and later ask nodes for their own server descriptors while building the circuit through them. It would make each circuit more time-consuming to build, but make bootstrapping much cheaper. Microdescriptors obsolete a lot of this proposal, and present some difficulties in using in a way compatible with it. (6/2012) 143 Improvements of Distributed Storage for Tor Hidden Service Descriptors Here's a proposal from Karsten about making the hidden service DHT more reliable and secure to use. It could use more discussion and analysis. We should look into it as part of efforts to improve designs for the next generation of hidden services. One problem with the analysis here, though, is that it assumes a fixed set of servers that doesn't change. One reason that we upload to N servers at each chosen point in the ring is that the hidden service host and the hidden service client may have different views of which servers exist. We need to re-do the analysis with some fraction of recent consensuses. (11/2013) 144 Increase the diversity of circuits by detecting nodes belonging the same provider This is a version of the good idea, "Let's do routing in a way that tries to keep from routing traffic through the same provider too much!" There are complex issues here that the proposal doesn't completely address, but I think it might be a fine idea for somebody to see how much more we know now than we did in 2008, particularly in light of the relevant paper(s) by Matt Edmann and Paul Syverson. (5/2011) 145 Separate "suitable as a guard" from "suitable as a new guard" [NEEDS-RESEARCH] Currently, the Guard flag means both "You can use this node as a guard if you need to pick a new guard" and "If this node is currently your guard, you can keep using it as a guard." This proposal tries to separate these two concepts, so that clients can stop picking a router once it is full of existing clients using it as a guard, but the clients currently on it won't all drop it. It's not clear whether this has anonymity issues, and it's not clear whether the imagined performance gains are actually worthwhile. (5/2011) 147 Eliminate the need for v2 directories in generating v3 directories This proposal explains a way that we can phase out the vestigial use of v2 directory documents in keeping authorities well-informed enough to generating the v3 consensus. It's still correct; somebody should implement it before the v2 directory code rots any further. (5/2011) 156 Tracking blocked ports on the client side This proposal provides a way for clients to learn which ports they are (and aren't) able to connect to, and connect to the ones that work. It comes with a patch, too. It also lets routers track ports that _they_ can't connect to. I'm a little unconvinced that this will help a great deal: most clients that have some ports blocked will need bridges, not just restriction to a smaller set of ports. This could be good behind restrictive firewalls, though. The router-side part is a little iffy: routers that can't connect to each other violate one of our network topology assumptions, and even if we do want to track failed router->router connections, the routers need to be sure that they aren't fooled into trying to connect repeatedly to a series of nonexistent addresses in an attempt to make them believe that (say) they can't reach port 443. This one is a paradigmatic "open" proposal: it needs more discussion. The patch probably also needs to be ported to 0.2.3.x; it touches some code that has changed. (5/2011) 159 Exit Scanning This is an overview of SoaT, with some ideas for how to integrate it into Tor. (5/2011) 164 Reporting the status of server votes This proposal explains a way for authorities to provide a slightly more verbose document that relay operators can use to diagnose reasons that their router was or was not listed in the consensus. These documents would be like slightly more verbose versions of the authorities' votes, and would explain *why* the authority voted as it did. It wouldn't be too hard to implement, and would be a fine project for somebody who wants to get to know the directory code. (5/2011) 165 Easy migration for voting authority sets This is a design for how to change the set of authorities without having a flag day where the authority operators all reconfigure their authorities at once. It needs more discussion. One difficulty here is that we aren't talking much about changing the set of authorities, but that may be a chicken-and-egg issue, since changing the set is so onerous. If anybody is interested, it would be great to move the discussion ahead here. (5/2011) 168 Reduce default circuit window This proposal reduces the default window for circuit sendme cells. I think it's implemented (or mostly implemented) in 0.2.1.20? If so, we should make sure that tor-spec.txt is updated and close it. (11/2013) 172 GETINFO controller option for circuit information 173 GETINFO Option Expansion These would help controllers (particularly arm) provide more useful information about a running Tor process. They're accepted and some parts of 173 are even implemented: somebody just needs to implement the rest. (5/2011) 175 Automatically promoting Tor clients to nodes Here's Steven's proposal for adding a mode between "client mode" and "relay mode" for "self-test to see if you would be a good relay, and if so become one." It didn't get enough attention when it was posted to the list; more people should review it. (5/2011) 177 Abstaining from votes on individual flags Here's my proposal for letting authorities have opinions about some (flag,router) combinations without voting on whether _every_ router should have that flag. It's simple, and I think it's basically right. With more discussion and review, somebody could/should build it, I think. (11/2013) 182 Credit Bucket This proposal suggests an alternative approach to our current token-bucket based rate-limiting, that promises better performance, less buffering insanity, and a possible end to double-gating issues. (6/2012) 185 Directory caches without DirPort The old HTTP directory port feature is no longer used by clients and relays under most circumstances. The proposal explains how we can get rid of the requirement that non-bridge directories have an open directory port. (6/2012) 188 Bridge Guards and other anti-enumeration defenses This proposal suggests some ways to make it harder for a relay on the Tor network to enumerate a list of Tor bridges. Worth investigating and possibly implementing. (6/2012) 189 AUTHORIZE and AUTHORIZED cells 190 Bridge Client Authorization Based on a Shared Secret [NEEDS-REVISION] 191 Bridge Detection Resistance against MITM-capable Adversaries Proposal 187 reserved the AUTHORIZE cell type; these proposals suggests how it could work to try to make it harder to probe for Tor bridges. They need more alternatives and attention, and possibly some revision and analysis. Number 190 needs revision, since its protocol isn't actually so great. (11/2013) 192 Automatically retrieve and store information about bridges This proposal gives an enhancement to the bridge information protocol, where clients remember more things about bridges, and are able to update what they know about them over time. Could help a lot with bridge churn. (6/2012) 194 Mnemonic .onion URLs Here's one of several competing "let's make .onion URLs human-usable" proposals. This one makes sentences using a fixed map. This kind of approach is likely to obsoleted if we go ahead with current plans for hidden services that would make .onion addresses much longer, though. (11/2013) 195 TLS certificate normalization for Tor 0.2.4.x Here's the followup to proposal 179, containing all the parts of proposal 179 that didn't get built, and a couple of other tricks besides to try to make Tor's default protocol less detectable. I'm pretty psyched about the part where we let relays drop in any any self-signed or CA-issued certificate that they like. Some of this is done in ticket #7145; we should decide, however, how much we want to push towards normalizing the main Tor protocol. (11/2013) 196 Extended ORPort and TransportControlPort Here are some remaining pieces of the pluggable transport protocol that give Tor finer control over the behavior of its transports. Much of this is implemented in 0.2.5 now; we should figure out what's left, and whether we want to build that. (11/2013) 197 Message-based Inter-Controller IPC Channel This proposal is for an architectural enhancement in Tor deployments, where Tor coordinates communications between the various programs (Vidalia, TorBrowser, etc) that are using it. (6/2012) 199 Integration of BridgeFinder and BridgeFinderHelper Here's a proposal for how Tor can integrate with a client program that finds bridges for it. I've seen some work being done on things called "BridgeFinder"; I don't know what the status of the current proposal is, though. (11/2013) 201 Make bridges report statistics on daily v3 network status requests Here's a proposal for bridges to better estimate the number of bridge users. (6/2012) 202 Two improved relay encryption protocols for Tor cells Here's a sketch of the two broad classes of alternatives for improving how relay encryption works. Right now, progress on this proposal is stalled waiting for the ideal wide-block construction to come along the line. (11/2013) 203 Avoiding censorship by impersonating an HTTPS server This one is a design for making a bridge that acts like an HTTPS server (by *being* an HTTPS server) until the user proves they know it's a bridge. (11/2013) 209 Tuning the Parameters for the Path Bias Defense In this proposal, Mike discusses alternative parameters for getting better result out of the path-bias-attack detection code. (11/2013) 210 Faster Headless Consensus Bootstrapping This proposal suggests that we get our initial consensus by launching multiple connections in parallel, and fetching the consensus from whichever one completes. In my opinion, that would be a fine idea when we're fetching our initial consensus from non-Authority DirSources, but we shouldnt' do anything to increase the load on authorities. (11/2013) 211 Internal Mapaddress for Tor Configuration Testing Here, the idea is to serve an XML document over HTTP that would let the know when it's using Tor. The XML document would be returned when you make a request over Tor for a magic address in 127.0.0.0/8. I think we need to do _something_to solve this problem, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of having any more magical addresses like this; we got rid of .noconnect for a reason, after all. (11/2013) 212 Increase Acceptable Consensus Age This proposal suggests that we increase the maximum age of a consensus that clients are willing to use when they can't find a new one, in order to make the network robust for longer against a failure to reach consensus. In my opinion, we should do that. If I recall correctly, there was some tor-dev discussion on this one that should get incorporated into a final, implementable version. (11/2013) 215 Let the minimum consensus method change with time This proposal describes how we can raise the minimum allowable consensus method that all authorities must support, since the ancient "consensus method 1" would not actually be viable to keep the Tor network running. We should do this; see ticket #10163. (11/2013) 219 Support for full DNS and DNSSEC resolution in Tor Here's a design to allow Tor to support a full range of DNS request types. It probably isn't adequate on its to make DNSSEC work realistically, since naive DNSSEC requires many round trips that wouldn't be practical over Tor. It has a ton of inline discussion that needs to get resolved before this is buildable. One thing to consider here is whether we can get the server-side done with reasonable confidence, and figure out the client side once more servers have upgraded. (12/2013) 220 Migrate server identity keys to Ed25519 This one is an intial design to migrate server identity keys to Ed25519 for improved security margin. It needs more analysis of long-term migration to other signing key types -- what do we do if we want to add support for EdDSA over Curve2617 or something? Can we make it easier than this? And it also needs analysis to make sure it enables us to eventually drop RSA1024 keys entirely. I've started building this, though, so we'd better figure out out fairly soon. Other proposals, like 224, depend on this one. (12/2013) 223 Ace: Improved circuit-creation key exchange Here's an interesting one. It proposes a replacement for the ntor handshake, using the multi-exponentiation optimization, to run a bit faster at an equivalent security level. Assuming that more cryptographers like the security proof, and that the ntor handshake winds up being critical-path in profiles as more clients upgrade to 0.2.4 or 0.2.5, this is something we should consider. (12/2013) 224 Next-Generation Hidden Services in Tor This proposal outlines a more or less completely revised version of the Tor hidden services protocol, improved to accomodate better cryptography, better scalability, and defenses for several attacks we'd never considered when we did the original design. Some parts of this one are clearly right; some (like scalability) are entirely unwritten. This proposal needs a lot of attention and improvements to get it done right. I hope to implement this over the course of 2014. (12/2013) 225 Strawman proposal: commit-and-reveal shared rng Proposal 224's solutions for bug #8244 require that authorities regularly agree upon a shared random value which none of them could have influenced or predicted in advance. This proposal outlines a simple one that isn't perfect (it's vulnerable to DOS and to limited influence by one or more collaborating hostile authorities), but it's quite simple, and it's meant to start discussion. I hope that we never build this, but instead replace it with something better. Some alternatives have already been discussed on tor-dev; more work is needed, though. (12/2013) Since last time: 223, 224, and 225 are new. 157 was finally finished and closed; see ticket #10162.

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Torsocks tests
by Luke Gallagher 27 Jan '14

27 Jan '14

Hi, I would like to help with the unit tests for Torsocks, I was thinking of starting with utils and config-file tests, does this sound like a reasonable place to start? regards, Luke

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Seeking advice on master level project
by Yiwen Zhu 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

Hi guys, I am current a master student working on a graduation project. I am interested in the project Develop a Censorship Analyzer for Tor. But I am new to Python and only have 1 semester to finish it. So it seems too large scale for me to undertake this project. I am wondering whether it is an appropriate project for me. I will appreciate any comments and suggestions. Thanks, Yiwen

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Python bindings for wireshark
by Lukas Lueg 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

Hi, Damian suggested to post this to the entire list: Given the dark abyss that packet dissection libraries available to Python are, I've just started a foreign function interface to Wireshark. Wirepy aims to make the most useful features of Wireshark - more than 1.400 protocols supported in current svn, endless extra information through taps / session reconstruction, wide platform support - available to Python code. Wirepy uses the libraries underneath the Wireshark GUI directly and can - in principle - do anything Wireshark does. The library is compatible to Python3 (python2 may work but untested / don't care) and PyPy. It just matured to it's own git repo and is just good enough to capture and dissect traffic with close-to-metal code. While valgrind shows that about 35% of cpu time is spent in the Python interpreter, a single of my laptop's cores can handle about 100mbit of traffic per second - *much* more than other python libraries. Multiple cpu cores can easily be used by help of the multiprocessing module. The code now lives at https://github.com/lukaslueg/wirepy I'd be grateful for comments, passing the word, and contributions. Best regards

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gitian replacement proposal
by Nicolas Vigier 25 Jan '14

25 Jan '14

Hello, You can find at this URL a proposal to refactor the tor browser bundle build process, using an other tool to replace gitian: https://people.torproject.org/~boklm/automation/tor-automation-proposals.ht… (also added as attached file to this email) I made a prototype to show how it would work: https://github.com/boklm/burps-tor The main improvements in this prototype from the current build process are: - all components are built separately, and include in their output file name the commit hash or version, architecture and OS (if architecture dependant). This allows us to keep previous builds if the commit/version/architecture/OS didn't change. So we can rebuild a bundle very quickly when the browser didn't change. - the gitian replacment has features to download tarballs and verify them with sha256sum or gpg signature, so this can replace the fetch-inputs.sh script. - we can remove the linux/windows/macosx descriptors duplication, and instead use template directives for the parts that differ between those builds (it's still possible to use separate files if they differ completly). - we can define variables based on selected OS. This allows for instance to build python 2.7 when building on Ubuntu Lucid, but avoid building it on other distros which already provide python 2.7. - we can define variables based on "targets" that are set on command line. For instance in the prototype using "--target enable_pt" instructs to include the portable transports (only pyptlib in this prototype) in the bundle. - we can easily switch from building in a VM to building locally - build descriptors can depend on the result of another build descriptor. This remove needs for scripts like mkbundle-*.sh. And I think those improvements should make it easier to rebuild a new bundle automatically when any of the components of the bundle receives a new commit, and then run tests on this bundle. Nicolas

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[Question] Onion router's bandwidth
by hyoseok Lee 23 Jan '14

23 Jan '14

Hi I am junior student in Sungkyunkwan University,South Korea I am studying Tor for my paper In my research, onion router has to report its bandwidth by sending descriptor to authority directory. and then authority directory verifies onion router's bandwidth [Question 1] I hope to know the way how authority directory verifies bandwidth which came from onion router. I was told that authority directory had bandwidth verifying tool called bandwidth scanner. How can I get source code of bandwidth scanner ? [Question 2] I made my own onion router, I configured my onion router's bandwidth 100kB/s But, In updated cached-microdesc-consensus file, My onion router's bandwidth was estimated at 20kB/s and there is "unmeasured=1" It means my onion router's bandwidth had not been estimated. what is difference between measured router and unmeasured router ? Thank you for reading my question

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Projects to combat/defeat data correlation
by Jim Rucker 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

There was a story in the news recently of a Harvard student who used Tor to send a bomb threat to Harvard in order to cancel classes so he wouldn't have to take a test. He was apprehended within a day, which puts into question the anonymity of Tor. >From my understanding (please correct me if I'm wrong) Tor has a weakness in that if someone can monitor data going into the relays and going out of the exit nodes then they can defeat the anonymity of tor by correlating the size and number of packets being sent to relays and comparing those that the packets leaving the exit nodes. Are there any projects in Tor being worked in to combat data correlation? For instance, relays the send/recv constant data rates continuously - capping data rates and padding partial or non-packets with random data to maintain the data rates

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Estimating Traffic Correlation Attack ?
by Salahuddin Pasha 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

Hi, I am a student of Saarland University and doing research for a seminar in which we are supposed to do Research-Paper on a certain topic. In my group we want to make the first step towards a tool that could help us predict via which ASNs and IXPs a route will be go. In other words, given two IP addresses (in our case two Tor relays) through which ASNs and IXPs do the expected route or routes go. Such a tool would help estimating whether he would take the risk that some of the ASNs and IXPs could potentially perform a traffic correlation attack. As we want to avoid reinventing the wheel, we wanted to ask you the following questions: 1) Are you aware of an open database or of client-side scripts that could help us predict via which ASNs and IXPs a route will be go, from one given IP address to another given IP address (in our case from one Tor relay to another Tor relay)? 2) Are you aware of any way to map IP addresses to ASNs and IXPs like client-side tools or open-access databases? We already did some research and came across the following sides, providing tools and data concerning our questions: 1. http://www.cs.umd.edu/~nspring/scriptroute.html 2. http://asn.cymru.com/ 3. https://www.robtex.com/ 4. whois + RIPE/APNIC/CMYRU/ARIN to identify address spaces of and to label ASs by iterating over the IPv4 address space, parsing the gathered information and skipping already labeled addresses if NetRange is provided. However, we wanted to ask you whether you are aware of more work concerning our research direction. It seems to us that somebody should already have been interested in such a questions. We would appreciate your help. Best regards, Salahuddin

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Attributes of Current Public Bridges
by Matthew Finkel 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

Hi everyone, Over the last few days there were a few questions raised regarding the current status of public bridges and their pluggable transports. I've written a script to gather some data points using the sanitized bridge descriptors and extrainfo documents provided on metrics.tp.o. If anyone is interested in any specific attributes then I can work on providing them. Currently the script provides the number of bridges per distinct OS (Linux, Windows, etc) and per OS version/arch (Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux i386, etc), pluggable transports per OS, number of bridges using a certain versions of Tor, number of bridges that provided contact details (useful or not), and the number of bridges that have their ExtORPort configured (but I'm not sure this is correct). Please let me know what I should add to this list. #10680 is opened for this, as well, so feel free to comment there, too. Thanks! Matt

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Unable to clone gitian-builder repository
by Jacob Garber 20 Jan '14

20 Jan '14

I apologise if this doesn't belong in this list and for my inexperience. I am trying to clone the gitian-builder repository to test out the deterministic builds, but I'm running into an issue: "warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout." It creates the gitian-builder directory and a .git directory within, but it is otherwise empty. The command being run is: "git clone https://git.torproject.org/builders/gitian-builder.git" Should I be running a different command?

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