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Status Report - Evil Genius
by Johannes Fürmann 27 Jun '13

27 Jun '13

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi *, The first two weeks of working on my GSoC project[0], which has been dubbed "EvilGenius", are nearly over. and I just wanted to share a bit of the experience I made during that time. EvilGenius is a tool that - much like Descartes' idea of an "evil genius", it "presents a complete illusion of an external world, including other minds, to Descartes' senses, where in fact there is no such external world in existence." (Source: Wikipedia), it distorts the guests' view of the real internet, in short, it creates a virtual environment that simulates censorship in order to verify OONI's nettest modules. So, after getting started with vagrant, the virtualization abstraction layer used for my project, i started simulating a virtual netwotrk and configuring the hosts to act as if they were connected to each other and the rest of the internet through a router that is part of the simulated environment. the "precise32" box is used as base image for all nodes, and I created scripts that configure the network and packed it up in a nice vagrantfile. Then I began deploying ooniprobe and oonibackend and executed the first successful tests. Next week, I will begin working on censoring environments. Have a nice weekend everyone! Johannes -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJRzKDWAAoJEAgie5o3Q/JpUhAQAIt2WEpDsNyLVDuSdMBM0ETf q0sOxdx20Q6o77J93FJ4ZBJRzpBX4mlsE4t22Dl/TPgnHu3b+DG+dvVhfCBrQOqw wGUuA6/X/khCikAOo+f3T9fNtaHKw54phW1Tw9Yj3Gea7SBN5ZikfXKjIIHOT+lu n0xqWVzxAxqGOETy0byDznsdgc2OfaR2NkdxzCsLlZTLtE75h/EQ3U96ZCej8lw/ xmZZUD+q+4ZCE6bBKTebufQeh0eI/rUPgo0UX1rNLgUapfCs9oLVIF+8nwBKBU0j E2myEOUbXMCxtTURbHikRQKzGKlsXMCEqqSatik37Rc3VaeVdkxNiiyXFVRwzTr0 IwRTibzJ8hD+aqh9d9VDD6s7dIdRio42p+XzD8jswFltEyYcbBGeAFFiybdNeeE2 EFb7n7iHz7Gr1csezyma1fdqvvMHZaaeCMTqeRENQtBaazOnqDwrGJn83r/FC7QF m8i+3eVDm8suM7CzYvuYi8YSIhF7yMVerIBOcBSZ2A929SVKtQFT4by1V2Jc4pz+ 0ZJV4teS8xct0wjhpDLANBCXgnV07OO6Z6EgLhcWpJBWoZDONDaxikH7clmTlzdg w/9ZktL3Ac3PjhSdMjOI/TKqc68+CHQ7ln1mG+YtSimMjf5Abpx1wPgLLILmzFNS lpZ2vev2pW0DsCnvs946 =abNV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Gitian builds in VirtualBox with Vagrant
by Arlo Breault 27 Jun '13

27 Jun '13

If anyone has VirtualBox and Vagrant installed, https://www.virtualbox.org/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ and wants to try the new TBB deterministic builds, this worked for me, > git clone -b vagrant https://github.com/arlolra/tor-browser-bundle.git > cd tor-browser-bundle/vagrant > make Mike, there's a few patches in there you may want, https://github.com/arlolra/tor-browser-bundle/compare/vagrant Or you can take the whole thing. Enjoy, Arlo

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Damian's Status Report - June 2013
by Damian Johnson 27 Jun '13

27 Jun '13

Hi all. Without much ado here's my status report for June... * Stem: Migrated to the Mock module Our homemade mocking framework has served us well, but over time it taught me one very important lesson: writing a mocking framework is hard. On the surface it seems pretty simple: apply and revert a set of monkey patches. But how do you monkey patch class methods? What about alias imports like the os module? And god forbid you want to mock python's open() function. I'm finally taking a lesson from one of my coworkers and using a library for this. Python has several options but the most common is PyPI's mock module, which became part of the standard library in Python 3.3... http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/mock/ https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commitdiff/101cf0b?hp=65846e8 ======================================== * Arm: Pruning the torTools utility Arm's torTools module was a wrapper around TorCtl that provided caching, thread safety, and a better API. Now that we're using stem it's obsolete, and my aim is to completely eliminate it from the codebase. This is easier said than done however. This month I pruned vast swaths of the module, reducing it from 2768 lines to 1020... before: https://gitweb.torproject.org/arm.git/blob/refs/heads/release:/src/util/tor… after: https://gitweb.torproject.org/arm.git/blob/HEAD:/src/util/torTools.py Doing this required some expansions on stem's part. Added functionality includes... * get_pid() and get_user() methods in the Controller * system functions for getting a process' start time and FreeBSD jail path * the system module's call() wasn't respecting exit codes ======================================== * Stem: Remote descriptor fetching Throughout the month Karsten and I have been bouncing ideas back and fourth concerning a stem API for remote descriptor fetching... https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/stem#RemoteDescriptorFetc… https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-June/004957.html I have some s3krit ideas for improving this that will address both our use cases even better (spoiler: future style instances). We're coming up on a four day weekend so hopefully I'll be able to start implementing this soon! ======================================== * Stem: Expanded FAQ with answers to common Stack Overflow questions I took a pass over the tor related questions on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/tor), answering fifteen that concerned controller scripting. The vast majority of those unfortunately were some variation of 'how do I programmatically change my IP?' which I answered with a Stem FAQ entry... https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#how-do-i-request-a-new-identity-from-t… The only question I thought was especially interesting went along the lines of 'How do I check the IPs of the exits I'm presently using?'. I answered this with a FAQ entry too... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9777192/how-do-i-get-the-tor-exit-node-i… https://stem.torproject.org/faq.html#how-do-i-get-information-about-my-exits ======================================== ... and a handful of smaller tasks... * Investigated the descriptor version provided via tor's 'GETINFO ns/*' options. Contrary to to the spec it turns out these have been v3 all along, and stem now parses them as such. (#7953) * Our automated Jenkins test runs caught their first instance of tor regression. This concerned LOADCONF's behavior after merging a branch for ticket #6752 (#9122). * Handful of GSoC tasks (welcome/sorry emails after acceptance was announced, and org admin prep for the program's start) * Added msg_type argument to ControlMessage.from_str() (request by meejah, #8605) * Investigated cache consistency issue (thanks to Ravi, #7713) * Fixes for ONLINE target (patch by Jeremy, #8692) * Minor revisions to how consensus bandwidth-weights are validated (#6872) * Addressed an arm issue with certain TERMs (#9064) * Answered some questions from Sreenatha that came up while migrating Tor Weather to Stem (https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-June/005035.html) Cheers! -Damian

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Re: [tor-dev] [tor-talk] Client simulation
by Karsten Loesing 27 Jun '13

27 Jun '13

(Sorry for cross-posting, but I think this is a topic for tor-dev@, not tor-talk@. If you agree, please reply on tor-dev@ only. tor-talk@ people can follow the thread here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2013-June/thread.html) On 6/6/13 7:32 PM, Norman Danner wrote: > I have two questions regarding a possible research project. > > First, the research question: can one use machine-learning techniques > to construct a model of Tor client behavior? Or in a more general form: > can one use <fill-in-the-blank> to construct a model of Tor client > behavior? A student of mine did some work on this over the last year, > and the results are encouraging, though not strong enough to do anything > with yet. > > Second, the meta-question: is it worthwhile to answer the first > question? It seems to me that if the answer to the first question is > "yes," then the solution could be used to (at least) provide better > simulations of Tor (e.g., via Shadow or ExperimenTor). This possibly > naive thought would imply that the answer to the second question is "yes." > > I'd be interested to hear responses to my second question, either > validating my naive thought or explaining why the first question isn't > worth answering. I'd accept responses to my first question, too, in > case this has already been done. Hi Norman, yes, it's worthwhile to answer this question! I can imagine how at least Shadow and the Tor path generator would benefit from better client models. User number estimates on the metrics website might benefit from them, too. I found two tickets where we asked similar questions before, and maybe there are more tickets like these: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/2963 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6295 Some very early thoughts: - How do we make sure that we ask a representative set of people to instrument their clients and export data on their usage behavior? If we only ask people who read their favorite news site twice per day, our client model will be just that, but not representative for all Tor users. (Still, we would know more than we know now.) - Can we somehow aggregate usage information enough to make it safe for people to send actual usage reports to us? I could imagine having a torrc flag that is disabled by default and that, when enabled, writes sanitized usage information to disk. For this we need a very good idea what we're planning to do with the data, and we'll need to specify the aggregation approach in a tech report and get it reviewed by the community. Are your student's results available somewhere? Best, Karsten

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XMPP Pluggable Transport
by Alex Eftimiades 25 Jun '13

25 Jun '13

I have been working on creating an XMPP pluggable transport for Tor for a couple of weeks now, and someone suggested I send an email to this mailing list for suggestions. At this point, my priorities are ordered as follows: 1. Speed--I can watch low quality youtube videos on a bad internet connection, but there is a lot of down time while it buffers (not an unbearable amount of time, but enough to be annoying). This has been a big problem for a while, and I could really use some suggestions on how to speed it up. 2. Full GTalk compatibility. It seems you need to be on a recipient's contact list to send a message to them (at least without supplying a resource). However, I currently use messages to send connection requests to JIDs with unknown resources. Then when they reply, their resource is saved in a table. This technique works fine for everything but GTalk, which of course is by far the fastest of the chat servers I have tested. 3. Error handling--I need to make sure I take everything into account. I do not have anything that can reestablish connections if one computer disconnects from the chat server and reconnects. In fact, if it acquires new resources (which is what happens on GTalk), the other computers will be stuck sending messages to a JID with the wrong resource. I am pretty sure I can come up with some ways of dealing with this. Right now, looking for potential problems is just as important as pointing out solutions to more obvious ones. 4. Security. I know security is important, but the nature of the program just does not seem to admit many security threats. There are really just three that I can see: - The server can be told to connect to any ip:port by a client. - The server and client exchange their Python interpreter's sys.maxsize values (which could lead to profiling a computer's OS). The former can be fixed with a whiltelist and the latter is not even necessary (I just have not gotten around to tweaking that out of the protocol yet). - DoS. This would be relatively easy to take into account by limiting the number of connections a bot is willing to accept. Then the chat server itself will limit the amount of data sent from any one JID (for better or worse). If you think you are able/willing to help, read on for a summery of the concept and protocol below. Even if you are not well versed in XMPP protocols (I myself am learning as I go), just helping to test the program would be a big help. Thanks, Alex Eftimiades A brief summery of how the program works can be found here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9022#comment:42 , and is reproduced below: ---------------------------------------------<Summery of concept > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When using hexchat, the data is sent to a local TCP socket running hexchat (call it hexchat1). Hexchat1 then reads the data (thereby stripping it of its TCP header) and passes it over a chat server to another hexchat program (call it hexchat2) that sends the data to the appropriate ip:port (giving it a new TCP header in the process). The client thinks it is sending the data to hexchat1, and the server thinks it is receiving data from hexchat2, but the data itself is never changed. It might be broken into smaller chunks or combined into bigger chunks, and it might be delivered at unpredictable rates, but it is never altered. ---------------------------------------------</Summery of concept > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A more detailed overview of the protocol can be found in the protocol- spec here, though I will summarize it: ---------------------------------------------<Summery of protocol > --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When the program is started, it is told what JID(s) to use to connect to a chat server, and possibly the following optional parameters: 1. An ip:port to listen on. 2. A JID. Connection requests will be sent to this JID when a connection is is made to the ip:port specified in (1). 3. Another ip:port. This is the ip:port the bot connected from the JID in (2) should connect to. Note that any bot can connect to any ip:port that client asks for. This could be a 127.0.0.1 address, or a remote address (but will probably be the former). I plan to add a feature in which you can provide a list of acceptable ip:ports to connect to and refuse to connect to anything else (for security). However, that is not a priority at the moment. When a connection is made, the server and client exchange all JIDs they are using to connect to the chat server so they can each rotate through JIDs to send messages from and JIDs to send messages to. With the exception of initial connections, all messages are sent as IQ stanzas. When data is sent, it is base 64 encoded and sent with an ID number that is incremented each time a message is sent. When data is received, the id is checked against the id of the last message that resulted in writing data to a socket. The difference between these two ids is used as an index in a buffer. Then, messages are read from the buffer and sent to the appropriate socket. When a socket closes, a disconnect message is sent. Like when sending messages, an id stanza is included. When a disconnect message is received, the bot checks if there are any entries in the appropriate socket's message buffer. If not, it closes the socket and deletes it from the routing table. If there are messages in the buffer, the disconnect message is added to the buffer at the appropriate index as a string "disconnect" as though it were normal data. When a "disconnect" string is found in the buffer, the socket is closed and deleted from the bot's routing table. ---------------------------------------------</Summery of protocol > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [tor-dev] Gitian builds in VirtualBox with Vagrant
by Arlo Breault 24 Jun '13

24 Jun '13

> So this is a wrapper to install+launch a VirtualBox Ubuntu VM to use > Gitian in LXC mode? Sounds good! > > Exactly. Just codifies what it took to get it running in a VM. > > Hopefully by Monday I will have tagged TBB 3.0a2, and we will begin > building it. If your build matches (or comes close), I will merge this > stuff for 3.0a3. > > Note that I am about to commit some changes to mkbundle-*.sh, so be > sure to rebase your github branch for your build (which you will also > need to do anyways to pick up the latest 'versions' file tags). > > Ok. I'll keep my eye out for 3.0a2

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[Stegotorus] Fundamental problem with ack/retransmission mechanism
by vmonmoonshine＠gmail.com 24 Jun '13

24 Jun '13

Hello Zack, In testing the retransmission algorithm, I encounter situations that the ack/retransmission algorithm is unable to resolve by design. It happens when the header of a packet gets deliver but the middle part gets dropped. For example in the following scenario Server sends packet 1 len 4k packet 1 gets lost Server sends packet 2 len 64k the last 60kb of packet 2 gets lost client receives packet 2 partially (4k) and waits for the 60k to come. client sends ack to the server saying that packet one is lost server retransmits pack 1 client consider packet 1 as a part of packet 2, and thinks that now it has 8k of packet 2 client again sends ack to the server saying that packet one is lost server retransmits pack 1 client thinks now it has 12K of packet 2 client again sends ack to the server saying that packet one is lost server retransmits pack 1 client thinks now it has 16k of packet 2 etc Soon the transmit queue on the client side will get filled up by the ack packets, cause the client won't realize its mistake before it receives 64k of garbage and be able to compute the mac. Hence the server and the clients will remain in this deadlock for ever. Originally, Stegotorus was dropping any circuit with full transmit queue. But this was causing lots of problem because lots of time the client lags behind the server for a while to process all the packet and sends ack. If ack/retransmit by design wasn't meant to recover from partial packet lost and was only a defense for complete packet lost, then the dropper proxy isn't doing a good job simulating the intended threat model. Otherwise, if the ack/retransmit was meant to withstand partial packet drop, then we need to redesign it so it doesn't get trapped in such a deadlock. Maybe we should have a timer so the circuits with full transmit queue gets a grace period before getting dropped. This is not specific to chop protocol. I'm wondering how TCP is dealing with such a situation. Thanks, Vmon

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Standalone flash proxy
by Arlo Breault 21 Jun '13

21 Jun '13

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7944 Hello, I wrote a little wrapper to provide a headless flash proxy. It requires node.js >= v0.8.x To install and run, > npm install -g flashproxy # adds the flashproxy bin to your path > flashproxy Or you can, > git clone -b nodejs https://github.com/arlolra/flashproxy.git > cd flashproxy/proxy > npm install > npm start I'm looking for testers. Most of the time the facilitator won't return any clients. That's expected. Feedback appreciated. Thanks, Arlo

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Discussion on the crypto migration plan of the identity keys of Hidden Services
by George Kadianakis 19 Jun '13

19 Jun '13

Greetings, I'm supposed to write a Tor proposal for the migration of the long-term identity keys of Hidden Services. When I began writing the proposal, I realized that some of my choices might not be appreciated by Hidden Service operators, and that starting a discussion thread might be a good idea before writing the proposal. The problem with the current long-term HS identity keys is that they are RSA-1024 keys which are considered weak, and they need to be upgraded to a cryptosystem with higher security properties. One of the main issues with this operation, is whether Hidden Services will be accessible using their *old* identity keys even after the migration. That is, when we change the identity keys of a Hidden Service, its onion also changes (since the onion is the truncated hash of its public key). This will be quite problematic for Hidden Services that have a well-established onion address. There are basically two ways to do this: a) After the transition, Hidden Services can be visited _only_ on their _new_ onion addresses. This is quite brutal, but it's the most secure and unambiguous option (might also be easier to implement and deploy). This change can be enforced both on the client-side, by rejecting any old RSA-1024 HS keys, and on the server-side, by only publishing the new keys in HS descriptors. To make the transition easier, we could prepare a tool that generates a new identity keypair before the flag day, so that Hidden Service operators can learn their future onion address beforehand and announce it to their users. b) After the transition, Hidden Services can use both old and new onion addresses. This might result in a more harmonious transition, where Hidden Services advertise their new onion address to users that visit them in their old address. .oO(It would also be interesting to do a redirection on the Tor protocol layer ("I got this descriptor by querying for the old onion address, but it also contains a new onion address. I should probably use the new one."), but I don't think it's possible to redirect the user without knowledge of the application-layer protocol (e.g. 302 for HTTP). Still, a Tor log message might be helpful.) The cons of this approach is that supporting both addresses might make the HS protocol more complicated and painful to implement, and it might also result in some Hidden Services never moving to the new onion addresses since clients can still visit them using the old insecure ones. This approach has a stricter variant, where the old addresses can only be used during a transitionary period (a few months?). After that, clients _have_ to use the new addresses. Of course, this means that we will have to do two flag days, coordinate Tor releases, and other no fun stuff. I'm probably moving towards the latter option because the former will make many people unhappy. Thoughts? (This is not a thread to select the cryptosystem we are going to use. It will derail the discussion, and we might also need to select a specific type of cryptosystem in the end (e.g. a discrete-log-based system) so that schemes like https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8106 can be possible.).

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Running Atlas Application
by abhiram 18 Jun '13

18 Jun '13

Hello, I am trying to get the Atlas application to run. After installing the required python packages, I keep getting this error. Traceback (most recent call last): File "run.py", line 34, in <module> from tornado.util import b, bytes_type, import_object, ObjectDict ImportError: cannot import name b Its seems like a version problem with tornado. If so, what version should I be using. I am running python 2.7.3 and tornado 3.0.3. Thanks -- Abhiram Chintangal Graduate Student Florida State University Computer Science Department (850) 980-4954

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