On Sat, 26 Jul 2014 15:08:38 +0100 Kevin P Dyer kpdyer@gmail.com wrote:
Are there any roadblocks that prevent us from doing the following?
- Remove the hard-coded bridge_prefs.js in the TBB.
Ok.
- Set meek as the default pluggable transport in the TBB.
Sure that's also fairly easy.
- Use meek to acquire an up-to-date bridge_prefs.js from, say,
torproject.org.
Whowa, what? I get (from other parts of the thread) that there are compelling reasons for this, but I can think of at least two reasons why I would be massively against this.
a) Who is going to pay for this? The amount of data transferred will grow to be non-trivial rather quickly because each user that ends up doing this will do the full bootstrap. Granted, this will be a one time thing per bundle release (and a one time thing over the lifespan of the client in some magical world where TBB has an update mechanism), so the economic side in the future isn't quite as dire, but still.
b) Giving anyone a list of a subset of our users (and a particularly vulnerable subset at that, since they need to use PTs), seems dangerous at best. Going from "all meek users need to trust $CDN" to "the default behavior is to give $CDN a list of anyone trying to use PTs" at first glance seems like something that will only end badly.
- Use the information from the acquired bridge_prefs.js to connect
to Tor as normal.
No clue as to how hard this is.
Ostensibly, this doesn't do a better job of hiding bridge addresses. However, it allows us to modify bridge addresses without releasing a new TBB.
I don't see that as being a sufficiently compelling reason to give a third party the ability to enumerate (a unknown fraction of) the PT user base (while making them rich at the same time).
Regards,