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IRC meeting to plan sponsor L milestones on Wed July 18, 15:00 UTC in #tor-dev
by Karsten Loesing 15 Aug '12

15 Aug '12

Hi everyone, we have an upcoming sponsor contract starting on October 1, 2012 and running until August 31, 2013. To be precise, this contract is not signed yet, but it's very likely to happen. The general deliverables are already defined, but we can suggest which parts we plan to have done by which milestone. The deliverables can be found here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorL I suggest we have an IRC meeting with all developers who'll be involved in this contract. Deliverables are, of course, not yet assigned to developers. Here are the people who probably should be at the meeting (with most relevant deliverable numbers in parentheses): - Aaron (4) - Erinn (9, 10) - George (1, 2, 3) - Jake (10) - Karsten (2) - Mike (8) - Nick (3) - Runa (5, 6, 7) - Sebastian (9) - Tomas (9) The meeting will happen July 18, 15:00--17:00 UTC in #tor-dev. The main goal of the meeting is to decide on good milestones for December 31, March 31, June 30, and August 31 that will go into the contract. If somebody cannot make the meeting, please talk to me about their possible deliverables before or shortly after the meeting. (If too many people cannot make the meeting, we may reschedule it, but for the moment, let's aim for the date written above.) Thanks, Karsten

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My RSA-PM client-server
by Daniel Dennis 15 Aug '12

15 Aug '12

Last month I posted a message titled "Encrypted PM site/hidden service" inquiring about websites or services that allow users to write messages. I got a few interesting replies but none did exactly what I wanted. So I wrote up this code and put it on github. The major things to note are - Supports Windows and Linux (likely mac as well) - Written in C# .NET - Has a mono and non mono (plain windows) build - Is written in mind to NEVER TRUST THE SERVER - Client has the contents (re-)encrypted in a local database I spent some time ensuring it works perfectly. I was able to reach the server when it was behind a hidden service, I ran client and server on linux and windows. Everything worked as expected. https://github.com/sdjfjsdfiuhszduh/RSA-PM I don't want to host anything myself. It would be nice if someone could so whistle blowers could talk to others securely. If anyone goes through the code let me know what you think. Although I wrote it quickly so it may be confusing to others. -- http://www.fastmail.fm - IMAP accessible web-mail

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Pyonionoo
by Norman Danner 14 Aug '12

14 Aug '12

Hi Karsten, We have a preliminary version of the Pyonionoo front-end at git://github.com/meganchang/pyonionoo.git Make sure to look at the database branch. We'd be happy to hear feedback. Unfortunately, this isn't as far as we wanted to be. A run-down of the main open issues: * We ran into issues with getting sqlite in-memory databases to play nicely with multiple threads (stop-gap solution: use an on-disk database). * Right now it just has the summary handler, though adding the other handlers probably isn't a problem (probably a bit of minor refactoring). * The search GET parameter isn't implemented yet, in part because we realized that implementing it as specified in the protocol isn't so straightforward, at least in SQLite (which does not, in an obvious way, support searching for initial substrings). - Norman -- Norman Danner - ndanner(a)wesleyan.edu - http://ndanner.web.wesleyan.edu Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - Wesleyan University

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TBB Gentoo ebuild
by Alessandro Di Federico 14 Aug '12

14 Aug '12

Hi, I'm trying to put up an ebuild for the Tor Browser Bundle for Gentoo. As you may know an ebuild is a script which automates the build of a certain application. We already have something in Portage [2] (the official ebuild repository) but it's in an experimental state and we want to make sure that it's something useful and not harmful. So I'd like to know your opinion about the idea as whole (is it a good idea at all to build by yourself the TBB instead of using the official one?) and what could be the main problems arising in such an operation. So: 1. Can you name a list of tools to fingerprint a browser so we can compare our ebuild with the official TBB? 2. Which version should we use? We were planning to offer both the current official release (even if TBB for Linux is currently in beta) and something more recent, even if AFAIK this would be for testing purpose only and could weaken anonymity and untrackability. 3. We plan to use the system version of the Tor client, in my understanding it should not be a problem to use a Tor client with a version different from the one officially released, but I could be wrong. We also plan to exclude vidalia (and the "0015-Make-Tor-Browser-exit-when-not-launched-from-Vidalia.patch" patch). 4. We have a different ebuild for the Firefox profile directory (so if it's not installed the HTTPS Everywhere plugin won't be installed), is this a good idea or would it be better to integrate them? 5. Gentoo build system offers USE flags, which are options that allow to customize the way the package is built. These are the USE flag available for the standard Firefox ebuild in Gentoo, which is the base for our build of the TBB: 1. alsa: Adds support for media-libs/alsa-lib (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) 2. bindist: Disable official Firefox branding (icons, name) which are not binary-redistributable according to upstream. 3. custom-cflags: Build with user-specified CFLAGS (unsupported) 4. custom-optimization: Fine-tune custom compiler optimizations, setting this is not recommended. 5. dbus: Enable dbus support for anything that needs it (gpsd, gnomemeeting, etc) 6. debug: Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml 7. ipc: Use inter-process communication between tabs and plugins. Allows for greater stability in case of plugin crashes 8. libnotify: Enable desktop notification support 9. minimal: Prevent sdk and headers from being installed 10. pgo: Add support for profile-guided optimization using gcc-4.5, for faster binaries. This option will double the compile time. 11. startup-notification: Enable application startup event feedback mechanism 12. system-sqlite: Use the system-wide dev-db/sqlite installation with secure-delete enabled 13. webm: Use system media-libs/libvpx for HTML5 WebM video support. 14. wifi: Enable wireless network functions Looking at the TBB build script this the combination of USE flags to make as similar as possible to the official release (minus means the USE flag is disabled): -pgo -debug -bindist -custom-optimization -crashreporter webm ipc system-sqlite -wifi. I'm planning to remove the possibility to configure these use flags. Do you agree? For further details you can take a look at the ebuild [1], which should be understandable. Take a look also at the current ebuild for TBB [2]. Is there something else we should pay attention to in the build process or in general? Thanks in advance, Alessandro Di Federico [1] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/www-client/firefox/… http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/mozconfig-3.… [2] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/www-client/torbrows…

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[GSoC] [Stegotorus] update
by vmonmoonshine＠gmail.com 14 Aug '12

14 Aug '12

Hello Tor-devers, In last two weeks I was busy implementing the protocol by which the st server sends a url dictionary to the client, so they the client can communicate with server using this url code. It was bit tricky because chop needed to be involved to distinguished between the data being serve to the user and the data for the steg module. This is working now. I also made the curl st client to st server communication non-blocking and now curl sharing the socket with libevent (for the reply). The curl communication with apache server (for providing covers) is still blocking. This is not critical as long as the cover webserver and st server are on the same machine, but is a good feature to think about. You can get everything here: https://github.com/zackw/stegotorus/tree/f--payload-servers But you need to have apache installed on the server and run payload_scraper first: https://github.com/vmon/payload_scraper then copy the generated payload list into apcahe_payload/server_list.txt The name of steg protocol is http_apache (instead of http) The next 10 days will be writing unit tests, testing, and writing documentation for http_steg protocol. Cheers, vmon

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Fwd: [tor-relays] tcmalloc in FreeBSD
by Jordi Espasa Clofent 11 Aug '12

11 Aug '12

Hi, I posted this message in tor-relays, but it seems to me (and another people) that dev mail-list is better channel to use. Thanks! -------- Original Message -------- Hi all, From time to time my tor node (minibofh) stopped to work properly; since it's a tiny FreeBSD VPS, the root origin was some CPU over-consumption. I'm taking some actions to fix it (more swap, freeing CPU from another services... etc). The FreeBSD tor port offers to you the tcmalloc compilation option, so I had some fun reading this interesting paper: http://goog-perftools.sourceforge.net/doc/tcmalloc.html I recompiled the tor port but just using the tcmalloc option. Actually, now I got the google-perftool package and, obviously, the tcmalloc library: mb# pkg_info | grep google google-perftools-1.8.3 Fast, multi-threaded malloc() and nifty performance analysi mb# pkg_info -L google-perftools-1.8.3 | grep malloc.so /usr/local/lib/libtcmalloc.so /usr/local/lib/libtcmalloc.so.2 But, when I'm checking which libraries the tor binary is using, I get: mb# ldd /usr/local/bin/tor /usr/local/bin/tor: libz.so.5 => /lib/libz.so.5 (0x281aa000) libm.so.5 => /lib/libm.so.5 (0x281bc000) libevent-2.0.so.6 => /usr/local/lib/event2/libevent-2.0.so.6 (0x2844e000) libssl.so.7 => /usr/local/lib/libssl.so.7 (0x28489000) libcrypto.so.7 => /usr/local/lib/libcrypto.so.7 (0x284d7000) libthr.so.3 => /lib/libthr.so.3 (0x281df000) libc.so.7 => /lib/libc.so.7 (0x28090000) So... I understand that the tor binary is actually NOT using the new tcmalloc library. Am I wrong? PS. I adding a CC to tor FreeBSD port mantainer.

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Another key exchange algorithm for extending circuits: alternative to ntor?
by Nick Mathewson 11 Aug '12

11 Aug '12

Hi, all! Michael Backes, Aniket Kate, and Esfandiar Mohammadi have a paper in submission called, "An Efficient Key-Exchange for Onion Routing". It's meant to be more CPU-efficient than the proposed "ntor" handshake. With permission from Esfandiar, I'm sending a link to the paper here for discussion. http://www.infsec.cs.uni-saarland.de/~mohammadi/owake.html What do people think? -- Nick

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[Stegotorus] Strange comparison in chop_circuit_t::send_targeted(conn, blocksize)
by vmon 10 Aug '12

10 Aug '12

Hey Zack, Please take a look at this comparison in chop_circuit_t::send_targeted(conn, blocksize): if (avail > blocksize - lo) avail = blocksize - lo; else if (avail > SECTION_LEN) avail = SECTION_LEN; else if (upstream_eof && !sent_fin) // this block will carry the last byte of real data to be sent in // this direction; mark it as such op = op_FIN; Assume SECTION_LEN = 65536 suppose avail = 67000 blocksize - lo = 66500 => avail = 66500 avail = 67000 blocksize - lo = 67500 => avail = 65536 it's like that if avail is very big then the it is OK if it's bigger than SECTION_LEN but if it's moderately big then it shouldn't be bigger than SECTION_LEN, which seems very arbitrary. On the other hand if blocksize - lo < SECTION_LEN again it doesn't make sense, because then it never reaches to (avail > SECTION_LEN). So it's like if SECTION_LEN < blocksize - lo the behavior is random and if it's SECTION_LEN > blocksize - lo is useless. Moreover, when blocksize - lo > avail > SECTION_LEN I'm getting assertion error in the other overload of send_targeted. Everything makes sense and the assertion failure goes away if I replace the code with this: if ((avail > blocksize - lo) || (avail > SECTION_LEN)) { avail = min(blocksize - lo, SECTION_LEN); } else if (upstream_eof && !sent_fin) // this block will carry the last byte of real data to be sent in // this direction; mark it as such op = op_FIN; Please tell me what you think and if the second chunk is the correct replacement? Bests, vmon

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Re: [tor-dev] Another key exchange algorithm for extending circuits: alternative to ntor?
by aniket kate 09 Aug '12

09 Aug '12

> Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2012 00:22:59 +0000 > From: Robert Ransom <rransom.8774(a)gmail.com> > > On 8/8/12, Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net> wrote: > >> Michael Backes, Aniket Kate, and Esfandiar Mohammadi have a paper in >> submission called, "An Efficient Key-Exchange for Onion Routing". >> It's meant to be more CPU-efficient than the proposed "ntor" >> handshake. With permission from Esfandiar, I'm sending a link to the >> paper here for discussion. >> >> http://www.infsec.cs.uni-saarland.de/~mohammadi/owake.html >> >> What do people think? > > > * If you finish my implementation of the Ed25519 group operations > (which you would need in order to implement this protocol), you can > use them to implement a signature-based protocol (specified as > A-DHKE-1 in http://eprint.iacr.org/1999/012) which requires only one > precomputed and one on-line exponentiation per protocol run on the > server when implemented with a slightly modified version of Ed25519. > (The client's performance is much less important than the server's.) I went through A-DHKE-1 description (Page 36 of Eprint 1999/012). I find that A-DHKE-1 also requires one online signature generation on the server side along with one online exponentiation. Therefore, A-DHKE-1 is computationally more expensive than the discussed protocol and probably even the ntor protocol based on the employed signature scheme. -Aniket

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How about virtual machines?
by Admin 09 Aug '12

09 Aug '12

Hello Developers, My testing shows that you can setup encrypted virtual machines in a country with easy access to broadband, and have someone from a country where good computer hardware is hard to find, the Internet got cut off to a point where only dial up is available, and manage to give these people access to broadband and high range hardware. In order to do this, you need to setup a remote desktop virtualization, where the user is able to use all of the resources of a virtual machine, while only using it's current device for rendering the screen of the vm and as keyboard, mouse or touch input. This virtual machine could reset it's state once the user logs off, leaving no trace of what he did while he was on it. Considering the only connection the user is actually making is to the vm location, there is way an oppressive government can figure out which sites are currently being visited or what the user is doing, unless it is already inside taking screenshots and keylogging. There is also the possibility of making cheap dial up enabled USB dongles, which are specialized in screen rendering by PCoIP and can be connected to any device, such as a smart tvs and tablets. Testing shows you can make Android virtual machines for those connecting through a touch enabled device, and keep the device's touch functions. Let me know what you think. Cheers

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