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Proposal 298: Putting family lines in canonical form
by Nick Mathewson 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

Filename: 298-canonical-families.txt Title: Putting family lines in canonical form Author: Nick Mathewson Created: 31-Oct-2018 Status: Open Target: 0.3.6.x 1. Introduction With ticket #27359, we begin encoding microdescriptor families in memory in a reference-counted form, so that if 10 relays all list the same family, their family only needs to be stored once. For large families, this has the potential to save a lot of RAM -- but only if the families are the same across those relays. Right now, family lines are often encoded in different ways, and placed into consensuses and microdescriptor lines in whatever format the relay reported. This proposal describes an algorithm that authorities should use while voting to place families into a canonical format. This algorithm is forward-compatible, so that new family line formats can be supported in the future. 2. The canonicalizing algorithm To make a the family listed in a router descriptor canonical: For all entries of the form $hexid=name or $hexid~name, remove the =name or ~name portion. Remove all entries of the form $hexid, where hexid is not 40 hexadecimal characters long. If an entry is a valid nickname, put it into lower case. If an entry is a valid $hexid, put it into upper case. If there are any entries, add a single $hexid entry for the relay in question, so that it is a member of its own family. Sort all entries in lexical order. Remove duplicate entries. Note that if an entry is not of the form "nickname", "$hexid", "$hexid=nickname" or "$hexid~nickname", then it will be unchanged: this is what makes the algorithm forward-compatible. 3. When to apply this algorithm We allocate a new consensus method number. When building a consensus using this method or later, before encoding a family entry into a microdescriptor, the authorities should apply the algorithm above. Relay MAY apply this algorithm to their own families before publishing them. Unlike authorities, relays SHOULD warn about unrecognized family items.

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Updates and review on "Proposal 254: Padding Negotiation"
by George Kadianakis 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

Hey Mike, I took another look at prop#254 and made some changes of my own in my torspec branch circuitpadding-proposal-updates (see commit ab37543). Let me know if they look right to you. Some of those I had to look into the code to understand, and I hope I got them right. Furthermore, I opened a pull request with a few questions and comments for further improvements and clarifications: https://github.com/torproject/torspec/pull/39 Cheers!

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Re: [tor-dev] obfs4, meek, active probing and the timeline of pluggable transports
by Piyush Kumar Sharma 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

Hello all, I have a few specific questions related to the pluggable transports. 1.) I believe that obfs4 stops active probing(the latest problem as brought to notice by Ensafi et al, IMC 2015 and Shinying Cho, FOCI 2018), and hence discovering obfs4 Tor bridges using active probing is not possible. Is that true? If so, then we are good to go and hence we don't need any other pluggable transport to work for us as long as obfs4 is working? 2.) What was the motivation to bring in meek as a pluggable transport, given the fact that obfs4 works great to cover all the existing problems with Tor detection. Was the motivation just the fact that, it will be much easier for the users to use meek than obfs4 or something other than this? 3.) I searched a lot but could not find the timeline in which pluggable transports were built. As in what was developed and deployed first, obfs4 or meek? Regards Piyush IIITD

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Add EVENT message to pt-spec.txt and control-spec.txt
by David Goulet 29 Oct '18

29 Oct '18

Greetings tor-dev! We've been working on improving PT reporting towards Tor so for instance Tor Browser can better inform the user or take actions based on the PT state when connecting to the network. The following ticket summarize it: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28180 To achieve this, we are submitting these to torspec.git patches to extend both the pt-spec.txt and control-spec.txt to support such mechanism. This is the first draft. Below is the link to the PT spec patch. It adds the EVENT message that for now is only used, as you will see, for reporting connection status message. However, you should see this EVENT message as extendable to whatever the PT would like to report to Tor that we can think of in the future: https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/dgoulet/torspec.git/commit/?h=ticket2818… The second, is simpler, it is how Tor will send it back to the control port: https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/dgoulet/torspec.git/commit/?h=ticket2818… Please, any questions or feedbacks is very welcome! The main idea here is to keep things simple and extendable. Note that since Tor doesn't implement the PT 2.0 spec yet, we haven't done anything for that spec but after skimming the version 2, I think we can easily move this EVENT message concept if we want it. Cheers! David -- t2Mtu4qBote14xSTFee/xnHlXp1eabwHFbehBlktnus=

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(no subject)
by sarpedon montecarlo 27 Oct '18

27 Oct '18

Hi! I am supposed to implement, a python application that runs tor in background. The running tor is under direct control of the python app via control port. This running tor, is the proxy for the Tor Browser; By this I mean, when the Tor Browser starts, it will connect to this process, instead of the bundled tor provided by itself. The controlling features I am into, are as below: A) I want to attach streams coming from each tabs of the Tor Browser, attached to a separate circuit; By this I mean each tab of the browser, use a separate circuit, and do not share circuits with each other.(just like the way ordinary TBB does that) for this I am aware that Tor Button plugin does something with the streams to separate streams of a specific tab from other streams. Then by using IsolateSocksStream option on the tor side, tor will successfully isolate each tabs streams. My problem here, is that I am handling the routing and stream attaching all by myself and I can not use the provided IsolateSocksStream option because I am handling the circuit generation by myself because of the specific policies I am using for generating circuits, and their related paths. So if I am facing a bunch of streams, and I have a bunch of circuits myself, How am I going to detect that Stream A is from tab A of TBB and Stream B is from tab B of TBB, so I attach stream A to circuit A, and attach stream B to circuit B. Thanks in advance.

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UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header
by George Kadianakis 26 Oct '18

26 Oct '18

UX improvement proposal: Onion auto-redirects using Alt-Svc HTTP header ======================================================================== 1. Motivation: Lots of high-profile websites have onion addresses these days (e.g. Tor , NYT, blockchain, ProPublica). All those websites seem confused on what's the right way to inform their users about their onion addresses. Here are some confusion examples: a) torproject.org does not even advertise their onion address to Tor users (!!!) b) blockchain.info throws an ugly ASCII page to Tor users mentioning their onion address and completely wrecking the UX (loses URL params, etc.) c) ProPublica has a "Browse via Tor" section which redirects to the onion site. Ideally there would be a consistent way for websites to inform their users about their onion counterpart. This would provide the following positives: + Tor users would use onions more often. That's important for user education and user perception, and also to partially dispell the darkweb myth. + Website operators wouldn't have to come up with ad-hoc ways to advertise their onion services, which sometimes results in complete breakage of the user experience (particularly with blockchain) This proposal specifies a simple way forward here that's far from perfect, but can still provide benefits and also improve user-education around onions so that in the future we could employ more advanced techniques. Also see Tor ticket #21952 for more discussion on this: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/21952 2. Proposal Websites use the Alt-Svc HTTP header to specify their onion counterpart: http://httpwg.org/http-extensions/alt-svc.html The Tor Browser intercepts that header (if any) and auto-redirects the user to the onion site. Tor Browser only does so if the header is served over HTTPS. (That's it.) 3. Improvements 3.1. User education through notifications To minimize the probability of users freaking out about auto-redirects Tor Browser could inform the user that the auto-redirect is happening. This could happen with a small notification bar [*] below the URL bar informing users that "Tor Browser is auto-redirecting you to the secure onion site". The notification bar could also have a question mark button that provides the user with additional information on the merits of onion sites and why they should like them. [*]: like this one: http://www.topdreamweaverextensions.com/UserFiles/Image/firefox-bar.jpg 3.2. Auto-redirects too intrusive? Make them optional. If we think that auto redirects are too intrusive, we should consider making them optional, or letting the website specify the desired behavior. If a website wants to specify an onion address but doesn't like auto-redirects, it could specify that as part of Alt-Svc and we could still inform the user that an onion is available using a notification bar again. 4. Drawbacks This proposal is far from the perfect solution of course. Here are a few reasons why: 4.1. Auto-redirects are scary Novice users or paranoid users might freak out with auto-redirects since it's unexpected. They might think they are under attack or they got hacked. An argument against that is that we are already using HTTPS-everywhere which is basically a redirection layer, and while its redirection technique is simpler, sometimes the derivative URL is not similar to the original URL, and we still don't see people freaking out. I think that's because people trust Tor Browser to do the right thing. Combining this knowledge with section 3.1 might solve this problem. 4.2. No security/performance benefits While we could come up with auto-redirect proposals that provide security and performance benefits, this proposal does not actually provide any of those. As a matter of fact, the security remains the same as connecting to normal websites (since we trust its HTTP headers), and the performance gets worse since we first need to connect to the website, get its headers, and then also connect to the onion. Still _all_ the website approaches mentioned in the "Motivation" section suffer from the above drawbacks, and sysadmins still come up with ad-hoc ways to inform users abou their onions. So this simple proposal will still help those websites and also pave the way forward for future auto-redirect techniques. 4.3. Alt-Svc does not do exactly what we want I read in a blog post [*] that using Alt-Svc header "doesn’t change the URL in the location bar, document.location or any other indication of where the resource is; this is a “layer below” the URL.". IIUC, this is not exactly what we want because users will not notice the onion address, they will not get the user education part of the proposal and their connection will still be slowed down. I think we could perhaps change this in Tor Browser so that it rewrites the onion address to make it clear to people that they are now surfing the onionspace. [*]: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2016/03/09/alt-svc 5. The future As I said this is just a simple proposal to introduce the auto-redirect concept to people, and also to help some sysadmins who are currently coming up with weird ways to inform people about their onions. It's not the best way to do this, but it's definitely one of the simplest ways. In the future we could implement with more advanced auto-redirect proposals like: a) Have a "domains to onions" map into HTTPS-everywhere and have it do the autoredirects for us (performance benefits, and security benefits under many threat models). b) Bake onion addresses into SSL certificates and Let's Encrypt as suggested by comment:42 in #21952. But both of the designs above require non-trivial engineering/policy work and would still confuse people. So I think starting with a simple approach that will educate users and then moving to more advanced designs is a more normative way to go. ====================================================================== Let me know what you think :) (Should this be part of torspec?)

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Domain Fronting, Meek, Cloudflare, and Encrypted SNI...
by Nathaniel Suchy 24 Oct '18

24 Oct '18

Hi everyone, Cloudflare has added support to TLS 1.3 for encrypted server name indication (SNI). This mailing list post is a high level overview of how meek could take advantage of this in relation to Cloudflare who until just now wasn’t an option for domain fronting. What this means: Effectively domain fronting works by sending a different SNI and host header. CDN providers like Cloudflare started double checking to make governments happy, scratch that line, I mean to protect their customers from fraud and abuse. They seem to of backtracked now. Encrypted SNI means that a firewall or coffee shop owner won’t be able to use SNI to see the real origin of TLS traffic. Why this matters: With the right adjustments for TLS 1.3 and Encrypted SNI support, Cloudflare may be a viable option for Meek. Risks: * Firewall products could always use DPI and block TLS 1.3 altogether. * Firewall products could block all requests with encrypted SNI. Thoughts anyone? References: * https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-sni/ * https://blog.cloudflare.com/esni

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Temporary hidden services
by Michael Rogers 22 Oct '18

22 Oct '18

Hi all, The Briar team is working on a way for users to add each other as contacts by exchanging links without having to meet in person. We don't want to include the address of the user's long-term Tor hidden service in the link, as we assume the link may be observed by an adversary, who would then be able to use the availability of the hidden service to tell whether the user was online at any future time. We're considering two solutions to this issue. The first is to use a temporary hidden service that's discarded after, say, 24 hours. The address of the temporary hidden service is included in the link. This limits the window during which the user's activity is exposed to an adversary who observes the link, but it also requires the contact to use the link before it expires. The second solution is to include an ECDH public key in the link, exchange links with the contact, and derive a hidden service key pair from the shared secret. The key pair is known to both the user and the contact. One of them publishes the hidden service, the other connects to it. They exchange long-term hidden service addresses via the temporary hidden service, which is then discarded. The advantage of the second solution is that the user's link is static - it doesn't expire and can be shared with any number of contacts. A different shared secret, and thus a different temporary hidden service, is used for adding each contact. But using a hidden service in such a way that the client connecting to the service knows the service's private key is clearly a departure from the normal way of doing things. So before pursuing this idea I wanted to check whether it's safe, in the sense that the hidden service still conceals its owner's identity from the client. Attacks against the availability of the service (such as uploading a different descriptor) are pointless in this scenario because the client is the only one who would connect to the service anyway. So I'm just interested in attacks against anonymity. Can anyone shed any light on this question? Or is this way of using hidden services too disgusting to even discuss? :-) Thanks, Michael

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Information on Pluggable Transports
by Pritam Kadasi 16 Oct '18

16 Oct '18

Hi all, i'am currectly working on a project on tor. can you help me to get enough resources for Pluggable Transports. i would like to know more on how obfuscation happens in detail. thanking you. Pritam

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[release] CollecTor 1.8.0
by Karsten Loesing 15 Oct '18

15 Oct '18

Hi, everyone! A new release is available: https://dist.torproject.org/collector/1.8.0/ From the change log: * Medium changes - Properly clean up sanitized web server logs in the recent/ directory when they turn older than three days. * Minor changes - Once more, fix the bug in the tarball-creation script where tarballs are not compressed in a run following an aborted run. - Improve logging to find possible issue with missing server descriptors. - Update directory authority IP addresses in default properties file. This CollecTor release is already deployed on all Tor Metrics CollecTor instances. Please direct comments and questions to the metrics-team mailing list: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/metrics-team All the best, Karsten

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