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[GSoC] Introduction - Vidalia
by Feroze Naina 26 Apr '12

26 Apr '12

Hello, I'm Feroze and I will be working on the hidden service configuration and bandwidth scheduling plugins for Vidalia. I'm specially excited about the bandwidth scheduling plugin as I've felt the need for this. Users would like to specify different bandwidth allocation for Tor relay at different times. Currently, you have to setup a cron job and manually create a script which is tedious. I will be creating a simple interface to specify hour-wise bandwidth for every day of the week. My proposal outlines this in detail - http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/feroze/6… I'll be on #vidalia and #tor-dev with the nickname feroze.

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[GSoC] Tails-server - Introduction
by jvoisin 25 Apr '12

25 Apr '12

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello, I am jvoisin, the student who will work on tails-server[1] during this year's GSoC; my mentors will be intrigeri and anonym. I already worked for Tor last year, on the "Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit" project[2]; and I hope that I'll do as good (and even better) than last year ! You can check my proposal[3] if you are curious/interested about what I'm planning to do this Summer. I'm hanging on #tor-dev with the nick jvoisin. Have a nice day, - - jvoisin 1. https://tails.boum.org/todo/server_edition/ 2. https://mat.boum.org/ 3. https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/jvoisin… -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJPl+vOAAoJEJdo/TzEiBXynroP/jgiFrf3/NgEyZXSqvlAENw9 cLrUvDl2auYq78l0cuwJXxS3qb4ypow8VfqLHhFEn9I+d3ei7l1L5ozO6QkLcjYy RISnWcN5HFkr5VKbU3LcSWXe50WqHh2/8SvzZxraMLpLpxxrOSWT9YnUtRu/m+LR aX5X10HXlsmTqrNEoJgUfzgePSwYUDltAHPrzI7NelznS+CyCukRpuJ/nJd3fkSR u/xlxoZR5aX3dIHMwupUISG0B59aYYbp1XUw1rYz+/XXMxLzcKblP+UqRk3ayuMg a2LVY1pA32wrS6Bev6rwf+7xYdbVYDpLgWkSfZIenP3q2ynv14iLkIkruQK73d4V ibj9DydcRBOhzdOm36xqoV1ddhI6upJqxPC53dwInCYQLuZUf8mu0tvNI/yivaGA MkvAFabPLpaqk8KNDPSoBFVgigsjJgXfHfkM3MUd8zLrHQf//Q9wYlr1MMZNNyG6 ajhZqRdFKiEUb6Mxgk3sVcIvZCTC37Kkd4RGWBcm8VMLZz/9+7346sgcx/E4yB5o GgU0qthsWB9Gpb7+VckedQFwQ/G+Ffjd7RIV3VJuTU6+QH7NPy1wmc30bVBE0wCY keLmWAOKVbDe5QmpZokx/j+Nx8gAah61Atq3BKFmshwI980BpCEC0KemGtEH8+oR mywN3qE7fF18micBUVWW =We9H -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Greetings && The APAF project
by Michele Orrù 24 Apr '12

24 Apr '12

Hello. I'm wrtiting this email to introduce myself to the tor community. I'm new to tor, I've started to discover its community with the GlobaLeaks project; and now, for the Google Summer of Code, I will be involved in the APAF project. So probably all these days I will hang around your irc channel and this mailing list, getting known to some of the core developers. The APAF project, as described by Arturo in https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-March/003416.html , aims to be a static file server written in python, on the same development idea behind the tor browser bundle: being a simple and portable executable for non-technical user. So, the core idea is to create a python standalone .exe / .app so that anybody can easily set up a tor hidden service and configure it (via web browser or gui, to be defined); hoping that this will spread the use of hidden services, which AFAIK, nowdays aren't so much used. The most powerful concept behind this in my opinion is that, by design, the APAF should be as modular as possible, so that any other python application developer will be able to build its own software in such a way that it runs as a Tor Hidden Service. "Most powerful" becouse learning and collaboration shall be behind the opensouce idea, which is what I hope to work for. Deadlines for the project are described in https://pad.riseup.net/p/APAF-timeline Starting today, I am going to outline the design of the APAF - which libraries it is going to use, mockups, how to be configured, and so on. Since I will probably discuss all these choices with my mentor Arturo on the irc channel #tor-dev, any advice is welcome :) Regards, -- ù

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Alternatives to Tor Exit Enclaves
by Arturo Filastò 19 Apr '12

19 Apr '12

The purpose of Exit Enclaves was to allow people running a website to make Tor users access it without ever leaving the Tor network. This leads to the clients having end-to-end encryption with the target destination. Even in previous version this had some issues, one of which was the fact that at the first connection the user would not be accessing the destination over a Tor circuit if the destination was provided in a hostname format (and not IP). The current stable version of Tor (0.2.2.x) still supports Exit enclaves. The new versions of Tor (> 0.2.3.x) use a new descriptor format (microdescriptors) allow relays to specify an Exit Enclave policy, but clients will not use it, therefore voiding the purpose of exit enclaving. I believe there is the need for something similar to Tor Exit Enclaving and the closest thing I see fit these requirements are Tor Encrypted Services (https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/ideas/xxx-en…) Encrypted Services (EC), are basically regular Tor Hidden Services, that do not provide anonymity for the server and gain a better performance because of this (they have a one-hop circuit to the RV and IP). The problem with making Encrypted services work to replace Exit Enclaves is that the client needs to have a way to understand that their destination is running also as an Encrypted Service. In this very high level overview I don't go into very much detail of how this system will actually work, but I hope it will prompt some discussion on the matter. I think this can be achieved mainly in 3 ways. 1) The client already knows all of the EC's 2) The client looks up if a destination is an EC when trying to connect to it 3) The final hop looks up if the destination is an EC These all have some drawbacks: In 1) the client needs to download the full list of EC's, therefore if the number of EC's get's very large it will take clients much more to bootstrap and they will need to store more data. The good thing of this though is that the speed of connections would be as fast as they are at the moment as it does not require any extra connections. In 2) the clients needs to complete an extra round-trip for every connection. I don't think this is a valid solution as it would degrade the quality of connections for every user. In 3) the final hop would do along side a normal A lookup for hostnames a CNAME lookup ( or another special field). If it finds that such a lookup returns a .onion address instead of returning a RELAY_CONNECTED cell it will return a ENCRYPTED_SERVICE cell containing the .onion address of the target ES. The client will then cache this address and connect to it. This approach adds a little bit of overhead (since two DNS lookups need to be made), but it is still faster than 2). It suffers from the issue of the exit node could spoof the .onion address and redirect the user to a malicious .onion address. This is quite a tough problem that I am still unsure how it could be solved. If we have support for DNSSec this issue could be mitigated. I would love some feedback on this topic. - Art.

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brdgrd: Protecting bridges from the GFC
by Philipp Winter 15 Apr '12

15 Apr '12

Hi, I've been working on a small tool whose purpose is to protect bridges from the Chinese firewall. The tool runs independently of Tor and analyzes/rewrites SYNs and SYN/ACKs which it gets with the help of libnetfilter_queue. It is quick and easy to set up and can be run by bridge operators. Basically, the tool achieves two things: - Evading the Chinese DPI engine by rewriting the TCP window size during the TCP handshake. This leads to a fragmented cipher list which does not seem to be recognized by the GFC. - Blocking scanners with two dirty hacks. I did not have a lot of time to test it yet but I've found the window size rewriting to be particularly effective (yet ugly). It worked with Windows {XP, 7} and recent Linux boxes. The scanner blocking strategies are not that effective since they imply many false positives, i.e., legitimate users being locked out. Before showing this to a broader audience, I need some people looking at the code, though. The code, just 600 lines of C, is available at: https://github.com/NullHypothesis/brdgrd/ Cheers, Philipp

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WebSocket pluggable transport
by David Fifield 15 Apr '12

15 Apr '12

Here is a draft of a proposal for a pluggable transport using the WebSocket protocol. In short, WebSocket is a socket-like feature accessible to JavaScript in newer web browsers. Here are some links about it: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455 http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets WebSocket is the transport used by flash proxies (which now use JavaScript instead of Flash). This pluggable transport is a necessary part of the flash proxy system as it stands, because something needs stand between a Tor client and a web browser proxy, and again between the proxy and a Tor relay. This proposal is mainly describing what is already implemented in https://gitweb.torproject.org/flashproxy.git The program connector.py is the client transport plugin, and for the server transport plugin I'm using a program called websockify. (websockify isn't completely satisfactory though, and replacing it is ticket #5575.) What's implemented works well enough that I have been using IRC over Tor over a WebSocket transport for about a week. I want to emphasize that this proposal is not the entirety of the flash proxy architecture, but only a part of it. I'm posting it here because 1) I want your help in getting it right, and 2) it may be useful beyond just flash proxies. Anyone interested in reading the proposal, I'd like to call your attention to a few points for comment. One is that there are different, partially incompatible, version of the WebSocket protocol. I have made the most recent version (RFC 6455) a MUST and any earlier versions a MAY. However it may be that in a little while browser support will be such that there is no reason to support old versions. The other is the base64 subprotocol used to send binary data over a text-only channel. WebSocket has a fully binary messages, but they are not supported in Firefox 10. This may be another thing that is changing rapidly enough to drop, as Firefox 11 and Chrome 16 do support binary messages. David Fifield

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IRC meeting to discuss sponsor F July milestone on Thu Apr 12, 16:00--18:00 UTC in #tor-dev
by Karsten Loesing 14 Apr '12

14 Apr '12

Hi everyone, we have an upcoming sponsor F milestone on July 1. Here's the list of deliverables: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year2#P… We need a ticket owner for all tickets in the July 1 milestone. We also need a schedule for each of those tickets with the next substep ideally being due in the next 4--6 weeks. I suggest we have an IRC meeting on Thu Apr 12, 16:00--18:00 UTC in #tor-dev. Here's the time and date for people not living in UTC land: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20120412T16 People who should attend are: George, Erinn, Nick, Steven, Roger, Aaron, Jake, Linus, Sebastian, and anyone else who wants to attend. If you have any input on the project tickets before next Thursday, please feel free to comment on them. The more questions we solve before the meeting, the better. Thanks, Karsten

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ampislay: anonymous connection trough IP spoofing
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) 12 Apr '12

12 Apr '12

Vecna [1], today published ampislay [2], an 8 years old project to implement anonymous communication trough IP spoofing. It's a not-so-conventional techniques, that have it's advantage and weakness, but that maybe considered within the Tor community for some particular use-case. It was a gift for my 2004 birthday (thanks!!!) :-) -naif [1] http://www.delirandom.net [2] https://github.com/vecna/apmislay

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SkypeMorph
by Hooman 09 Apr '12

09 Apr '12

Greetings, A while ago the Tor project rolled out Obfsproxy as a Browser Bundle [1], for users behind firewalls filtering SSL or detecting other characteristics of a Tor connection, to help them access bridges. In our recent work, SkypeMorph [2], we have tried to use Skype video communications as our target protocol for protocol obfuscation. SkypeMorph functionality is similar to Obfsproxy, but the connection between the bridge and the client looks like a Skype video call (the details of how we do this is discussed in the technical report). We also have an open-source proof-of-concept impelmenation of the SkypeMorph available at: [3] Notes: 1- At the moment our code relies on SkypeKit SDK [4] (a paid Skype SDK which you can get for around US$ 5) for Skype functionalities (the README file in the package explains how one can obtain SkypeKit). However, it can be easily ported to Skype public API [5], so users would not have to pay for it. 2- SkypeMorph and pluggable transports: Although our code can potentially be used as a pluggable transport, there is a minor difficulty with the pluggable transport framework that needs to be addressed before it can host our code. As mentioned above, our code uses Skype network for basic login stuff, so it takes a little bit more time than what Tor expect from a typical transport (like Obfsproxy), so the Tor client gives up building circuits after a while. We are aware of ORControllers tricks to solve the problem, but it does not seem to be the right way to do it and it would be awesome if the pluggable transport were able to tell Tor that it's working on setting up the connection, and that Tor shouldn't give up on it until it says it's ready. I am sure other transports could also benefit from this. Hooman [1]:https://blog.torproject.org/blog/obfsproxy-next-step-censorship-arms-race [2]:http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2012/cacr2012-08.pdf [3]:http://crysp.uwaterloo.ca/software/ [4]:http://developer.skype.com/public/skypekit [5]:http://developer.skype.com/public-api-reference

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Self Introduction for GSoC 2012
by junior 06 Apr '12

06 Apr '12

Hi Tor Community, My name is Tengey Junior Patrick, a 4th year student of the University of Ghana, in Ghana of course. I am offering computer science and Mathematics and am a programmer mainly in java who is very interested in participating in GSoC 2012 with Tor. I have read that Tor is participating in GSoC 2012. I am very enthused about what Tor does and I can’t wait to be a part of this campaign of improving Internet privacy and security. Especially because I have been a victim of Internet Surveillance where my password was tempered with so I am well motivated for this. I have been observing your community interactions for some time now. I have already subscribed to the tor-announce mailing list and the tor-dev list. I have also been idling on the #tor-dev on the OFTC IRC channel. I have gone through the proposed students’ projects [2] and some documentations on "Running Tor" [1] . I have downloaded and installed the stable version of the Vidalia bundle and I am acquainting myself with its usage. I want to know if I am doing the right things since I am new to Tor. Also I want to know if the project on "Tor Controller Status Event Interface for Vidalia" is still available to work on. I particularly program in Java and have done some work on UI developements. Also I am quite proficient in the english language and can play around with photoshop as well. But I don’t really program in c++ though I have learnt the basics in skul, so does that disqualify me from working on the project. If not, what else must I know prior to the application in order to get acquainted with your practices and better understand your organizational set up. I will be very glad if help is given me in this regard. Thanks a lot. [1]https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en [2]https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Projects

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