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Linus' August 2012 status report
by Linus Nordberg 01 Sep '12

01 Sep '12

Hi, What happened in August. Got most of #4564 working and parts of it merged to master, including - Directory authorities vote for IPv6 public relays (micro descriptors not yet merged) - Relays bind to and publish IPv6 addresses - Clients use IPv6 relays in consensus (not using micro descriptors) Created an IPv6 status and road map page roadmaps/Tor/IPv6 [1]. Tickets worked on include 4455, 4620, 5535, 6362, 6363, 6364, 6423, 6514, 6621. Made an interview for the Swedish paper Ny Teknik. What's happening in September. September is the month of getting Tor on IPv6 deployed! Primarily the client to non-private bridges parts and hopefully also client to relays. See above mentioned IPv6 road map page [1] for details. [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/roadmaps/Tor/IPv6 -- Linus

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Karsten's status report August 1--31
by Karsten Loesing 01 Sep '12

01 Sep '12

Hi everyone, August was a long month for me, and I feel like I spent more time reviewing other people's code than writing my own. That's really cool! We have a bunch of new metrics-related code now, and I hope there will be even more code contributions for me to review next month! So, below is what I did in August. Compared to last month's report, I left out how much of my developer time I spent on these tasks and added more links instead. Best, Karsten Added three new graphs to the metrics website: the first two graphs show our progress in operating 125 fast exits [1] (first half of #6498), which is a deliverable for sponsor J [2]; the third graph shows advertised bandwidth and bandwidth history by relay flags [3] (#6671). Also fixed problems with cutting off enough days from graphs for which we don't have enough data yet (#6593) and removed GetTor graphs and related code to reduce future maintenance effort (#6395). The gentle reader may have noticed that there was no mention of code reviewing in the paragraph above, but just own code writing. That's correct, the metrics website is still a one-man show. I'm planning to split up the metrics website beast into a component that produces JSON-formatted graph data [4] and ask other people to write components visualizing the data, like Walter Kim's metrics website prototype [5]. Hopefully there will be more code contributions if people don't have to mess with Java servlets in the current metrics website code. Reviewed Sathya's great contributions to what we're now calling Compass [6]. Compass is a website and command-line tool to filter the set of currently running relays and group by same country or same AS. It was originally written by delber to analyze Tor network diversity. Sathya improved Compass by adding options to show only fast exits and almost fast exits for the sponsor J project to add 125 fast exits [2], and he wrote the website part. Since Compass went live, we had a lot of tickets opened by cypherpunks that we're almost unable to handle [7]. Patches welcome, Sathya and I will review them! Improved graphs in Atlas [8] to show the displayed quantity on the y axis (#5388) and added graphs on various probabilities to be selected by clients (#5455). Arturo reviewed and cleaned up these patches. Speaking of code contributions, there are quite a few open tickets [9] that would benefit from JavaScript developers wanting to help out! Reviewed Pyonionoo [10], the Wesleyan students' Python rewrite of Onionoo, the data provider behind Compass and Atlas. More precisely, they were working on the front-end portion of Onionoo which gives out JSON-formatted data, not on the number-crunching back-end that Sathya is about to rewrite in Python (#6452). Basic functionality of Pyonionoo works, but there are a few defects (#6707, #6708) and one enhancement (#6709) that we'll have to work on before deploying it. Of course, we have more open tickets for the Java and/or Python Onionoo [11]. Converted even more old tech reports into the new Tor Tech Report format [12] (#5405). The goal here is to have a single place for all reports we produce and that other researchers can use to cite our work. Set up Rob's Tor simulator Shadow [13] to see if there are any usability issues that would prevent researchers from using it. Turns out it's not just a very powerful tool to evaluate changes to the Tor code, but also doesn't require its users to be rocket scientists. I'm planning to play more with Shadow in September and walk through the instructions in Shadow's wiki [14] to find any remaining pitfalls. And then I'll encourage Roger and Rob to blog about Shadow. [1] https://metrics.torproject.org/fast-exits.html [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorJ [3] https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth-flags [4] https://metrics.torproject.org/graphs/relays-by-country [5] http://tigerpa.ws/tor_metrics/ [6] https://compass.torproject.org/ [7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?component=Compass&status=!cl… [8] https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/D223399907113A1F216AAA64997BC1D4CFA8E… [9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?component=Atlas&status=!clos… [10] https://gitweb.torproject.org/pyonionoo.git [11] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?component=Onionoo&status=!cl… [12] https://research.torproject.org/techreports.html [13] http://shadow.cs.umn.edu/ [14] https://github.com/shadow/shadow/wiki

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Nick's August 2012 status report
by Nick Mathewson 31 Aug '12

31 Aug '12

THINGS I DID IN AUGUST I spent a few days vacationing with my family in Maine; took a day off for my birthday, and generally chilled out. I merged lots of bugfixes and patches -- some mine, some other people's, some requiring rewriting and review, some not. This included some security-related stuff that lost me a little sleep. It also involved hacking on some neat patches from Stewart Smith (with help from Jim Meyering) to revamp our build system. We put out a new 0.2.2. I fixed the more important (fixable) bugs in 0.2.3 (notably 6507 and 6244 and 6404), and pushed back on some others. IMO we're now ready to release the (probably) last 0.2.3.x-rc. I merged more patches into 0.2.4; see the new changes files there for more info. Lots of these were ipv6-related stuff from Linus. I started a draft for BEGIN2 cells so I can try to get a more future-proof IPv6 protocol implementation. This is blocked while I teach myself how DNSSEC works once and for all. I tried to get a little more testing on alternatives to our current (bogus, deteriorating) geoip supplier (see #6266) but didn't get anything beyond my older inconclusive results. I started working on an implementation for proposal 200, and a revised 202. With help from some libevent users, I fixed an SSL bug that might have been one of the (probably several) things making SSL bufferevents unstable. The fix appears in libevent 2.0.20-stable. I agreed to fly out to SF to accept the EFF's pioneer awards on Tor's behalf. I had an anniversary and a birthday. I proposed a crazy idea about a separate 0.2.3.x branch for DAs. I chatted a little about metaformats, and spent a while catching up on the ones I didn't know the details of. Currently I'm thinking YAML is a hot mess, and ProtocolBuffers is not too bad actually. There was this insane stegotorus bug that I sort of tracked down. That is, I can tell you which libevent commit to revert in order to make the problem go away (that is, 3467f2fa3bbff0dab6865), but I can't for the life of me figure out what's wrong with it. My current guess is that it provokes an issue somewhere else. A couple of friends/acquaintances approached me about working for Tor as a project manager. I told them to email jobs(a)torproject.org. I don't think we've heard from them yet. It would rock if we had a faster release schedule. I've been trying to find projects our size that do it right. This coming month I must help Linus get our September IPv6 deliverables deployed. I need to help Andrea get her refactored channel abstraction merged, and make sure she's got more stuff to do (and more interesting stuff to do!) as she transitions to full-time. I must get that blog post I'm cowriting with Steven finished, and our paper for November started. And I need to write some of my own code too. I also need to finalize a plan and a schedule for 0.2.4 and send them to the world. "when in danger or in doubt," -- Nick

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[GSoC] [Stegotorus] Recent activities
by vmon 31 Aug '12

31 Aug '12

Hey Zack, I know you are super busy packing for your big move, but I thought as tomorrow is the hard deadline for GSoC, is not a bad ideas to give you some final update. So most of last week I spent on the conflict that occurred between libcurl and libevent having their eyes on the same socket. I tried different ugly and uglier solutions but finally settled on this one which is not that bad: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12021217/how-to-ask-libcurl-not-to-liste… After that, I'm passing all time line tests now. However, when I look at the client log, I see that some of the sequence no are missing in the recv: like this 203.7169 [debug] recv: <3.81> receiving block 42 <d=0 p=9 f=DAT> T:203.7170: ckt 3 <ntp 1 outq 0>: recv 42 <d=0 p=9 f=DAT> and the next recv is like this: 203.7926 [debug] recv: <3.99> receiving block 60 <d=0 p=1 f=DAT> T:203.7927: ckt 3 <ntp 1 outq 0>: recv 60 <d=0 p=1 f=DAT> Is this for sure an error and loss of data? or there is a normal situation that such a thing can happen? For example when the whole block can't be sent over one connection? (otherwise how do the tl tests all pass?). Further more, I merged the payload scraper and stegotorus. I this way, http_apache checks for the payload database and if it's not there it calls the scraper (it needs apache to be installed on the same machine). These all are commited on the github. I started writing a unit test that fetch a webpage directly (using curl) and through stegotorus and check if they are the same. I thought curl is best approximation of a browser that is available to us. But as I don't think I can finish that till tomorrow, I'm going to spend the remaining time on documenting the 'uri transport protocol' and deal with small issues. After we are done with the evaluation, I'll go back to unit testing. Thanks for your help. Cheers, vmon

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Re: [tor-dev] TBB Gentoo ebuild
by julian 27 Aug '12

27 Aug '12

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 12 Aug 22:56 Mansour Moufid: > Even with webrsync you still have to trust the mirror(s), and then > the Gentoo release infrastructure... Forgive me my bluntness, but how is that different from trusting you? The methods are reliable, being Manifests and webrsync, the unknown variable is the trust you give the ones providing you with ebuilds. But those are identified by gpg on both levels. And the TBB is even worse, cause I also have to trust what's in the binaries. There is no way to tell what was actually compiled there. It could be something different than the sources on the git server. 13 Aug 00:28 Matthew Finkel: > 4) Given 3), is there a reason Tor is not at least an optional > RDEPEND for torbrowser via a USE flag (or another way)? There are no optional runtime-only dependencies in gentoo, this could change with GLEP 62. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0062.html I could however tell the user after compilation that he might want to use tor with this...erm... but I thought that's obvious. The fact that it's not forced for RDEPEND is simply, because there are setups where this is not wanted/required. 13 Aug 00:28 Matthew Finkel: > 5) If you did/do intend to create an ebuild for the TBB and not > just the browser, it should provide the exact same experience as if > the user downloaded it from torproject.org. I think this should > include Vidalia launching Torbrowser once the network is > configured. Definitely not. The intention is not to provide an all-in-one experience. I already had those arguments with the guys from #tor All I am interested in is the question about the firefox build-time configuration and if different build-time configurations could lead to vulnerability in the tor network. If there is the slightest doubt about that, I will remove this ebuild at once or fix it. - - hasufell -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQOpaJAAoJEFpvPKfnPDWzpI4H/igZDuVGyjdKEl9SvvV9gnY0 72esQTiHfx00gO42lOguutwBX54DV/S7HggEZy1P9UIi5gfJckrFKsM3Y9oD9tUX X9EZA6WEU3F90MD0gFFxH2jcoEbm85UfjJkEwI2Hy1+lEOPAZqzBV1F0sBE/Xd/U WwIgAHy8jKsTI1RTIW8r4VOoexifCllWvjbKiDNxeeixTQhwhvrCWnbqTI0WKR95 Er6LNwwYNh+Ugu7s6OwR7o3cUAuOXt3LUjf45bEGAgPF+lrqsXrfB9N5ANu+3177 94sxHgzYkRSsORjjl678/tZFfyp1jagX1FcT6O1dd/J4sHqfRdyZfy29d0DH/e0= =gCI5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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First five Tor tech reports
by Karsten Loesing 27 Aug '12

27 Aug '12

Hi Roger, hi Nick, here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this). If you agree that this is a good idea, I'll push the sources to tech-reports.git and put the PDFs on the Tor website. I need your confirmation for each report as part of the process, though. - https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/bridge-stability-2011-10-31… - https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/blocking-2011-09-15.pdf - https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/detector-2011-09-09.pdf - https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/relay-stability-2011-06-30.… - https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/data-2011-03-14.pdf Thanks, Karsten

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https://gitweb.torproject.org/check.git
by bgt56zhn＠Safe-mail.net 26 Aug '12

26 Aug '12

Where is the code powering check.torproject.org? There is https://gitweb.torproject.org/check.git, but the repo has no commits. Thanks

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an alternate MyFamily definition
by tagnaq 24 Aug '12

24 Aug '12

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi, when requesting a new group by feature for compass [1] (#6662 [2]) I discussed with Karsten about how to handle asynchronous/overlapping families: karsten: > Here's an example. Assume we have three relays: A, B, and C. These > relays state the following family relationships: > > A: A, B B: A, B, C C: B, C > > We require mutual agreement about being in the same family, so we > could either come up with family A, B or with family B, C. Which > one is correct? I proposed to go with family = A, B, C because there is a mutual agreement between A<->B and B<->C. A and C agreed to be in a family with B, and B agreed to be in a family with A and C. Such configurations can be found in the wild mostly due to incomplete MyFamily configurations on relays in big families. As every big relay operator knows configuring families is a non-trivial effort with a growing number of relays. Now I thought about it and wanted to suggest this MyFamily interpretation as an alternate approach to the fully mutual setup where *every* relay must be reconfigured as opposed to just two of them. Why? This would reduce the configuration effort required when adding a new relay to *two* relays regardless of how many relays are in your family. Now, the MyFamily configuration overhead for big families is a well known problem so I suppose someone else did already propose this approach? What do you think about it? [1] https://compass.torproject.org [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6662 a additional example to make this clearer: A: A, B, C B: A, B, C C: A, B, C D: A, B, C, D family = A, B, C A family member must have a *mutual* agreement with at least *one* node. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iF4EAREKAAYFAlA2YkoACgkQyM26BSNOM7Yp2wD/VTBw8BmUJlRZtIfXahIGX+t0 zwzP6MfRDwgPCsQMeEUA/3dUyyoq91Fx4lmihWHis2DZNAoM/CHh2MnwgMNL/W1W =FWRU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[GSoC] [Stegotorus] Pencil down
by vmon 23 Aug '12

23 Aug '12

Hey Zack, I just did my last pushes before putting my pencil down for the final evaluations. They take care of the followings: - The remaining of all your comments on the github. Except for "always use xalloc instead of new". I have used new extensively for instantiating objects. What's exactly about xalloc that's better than new, if you have overloaded both of them? - Documenting the http_apache steg protocol. The tl_oneway_c2s fails the http-proxy test. It still have problem with one-sided EOF. It used to pass when I allow the one way socket shutdown in the http proxy. So, I think stegotorus still have problem with EOF management. You might want to look at it when you have time. Happy moving! vmon

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Tor and NAT devices: increasing bridge & relay reachability or, enabling the use of NAT-PMP and UPnP by default.
by Jacob Appelbaum 22 Aug '12

22 Aug '12

Hi, My latest tech report is now up. I think it would be a nice idea if we could kick off a discussion about Tor, NAT devices and reachability. Tor and NAT devices: increasing bridge & relay reachability or, enabling the use of NAT-PMP and UPnP by default: https://research.torproject.org/techreports/tor-nat-plan-2012-08-22.pdf Feedback welcome and encouraged! All the best, Jake

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