tor-project March 2016

tor-project@lists.torproject.org

36 participants
31 discussions

Moar Project Ideas!!
by Damian Johnson 25 Mar '16

25 Mar '16

Hopefully the exclamation marks work. Thanks Sebastian for kicking us off! We have just twelve project ideas at present and many of those will go poof due to being outdated. We need moar!!! Please, please give thought to if there's something you'd care to mentor this summer. This is a great opportunity to kickstart development and get a new community member at the same time! We're a bit behind the eight ball right now since Google is evaluating our proposal as we speak, and if selected students will be checking us out on Monday (2/29). Got something? Then just shoot us text like the following and Sebastian or I would be happy to add it... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding Cheers! -Damian

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TV producer seeks ordinary Tor use case
by Kate Krauss 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

Hi all, I'm working with a TV producer who is doing a three-hour film about the history of the Internet and wants to Interview someone in the US who uses Tor for a sort of every-day use case unrelated to the information security field (person avoiding stalking? Looking at your business competitor? I have a few people but she's not that interested in them. Can you think of anyone who would be good? It seems like a promising film. I'm planning to refer them to LFP but would like to see what I can do to identify other people as well. Cheers, Katie -- Kate Krauss Director of Communications and Public Policy kate(a)torproject.org @TorProject 1-718-864-6647 (works for Signal also) PGP: CC0D 9B42 DE89 D4D0 619B A606 DDEB 3937 7D18 973B -- Kate Krauss Director of Communications and Public Policy kate(a)torproject.org @TorProject 1-718-864-6647 (works for Signal also) PGP: CC0D 9B42 DE89 D4D0 619B A606 DDEB 3937 7D18 973B

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CloudFlare blocking got more severe in December 2015
by David Fifield 24 Mar '16

24 Mar '16

I re-ran some of our analysis scripts from the "Do You See What I See?" paper to bring the graphs up to the present day. In the paper, our OONI-derived data only went up to August 2015, but now it's update to the present. Take a look at this graph, which shows the rate of Tor blocking over time (it's an updated version of Figure 7): https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/ooni-tor-blocker-rate-20160323.png The interesting characteristic is CloudFlare: after suddenly decreasing from 3% to 1% in June 2015, and slowly decreasing over the course of months to almost 0%, CloudFlare's blocking rate in the OONI data set suddenly increased to about 4% in December 2015. This is consistent with my own experience, that CloudFlare was pretty easy for a while, but lately it's much harder. These percentages are out of all HTTP requests issued by ooniprobe, and only count cases where the Tor request was blocked but the non-Tor request was not blocked. There could also be other confounding factors that we haven't investigated, like maybe OONI's URL list or probe distribution changed suddenly. If you would like to dig deeper, here is the source code that generates the graph: git clone https://www.bamsoftware.com/git/ooni-tor-blocks.git The findblocks.csv file in the source contains a summary of each HTTP request pair issued by ooniprobe, distilled from the raw reports.

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changes to using sudo on torproject.org systems
by Peter Palfrader 22 Mar '16

22 Mar '16

[If you do not use sudo on torproject.org systems, you need not read this.] Comrades, some of you maintain services on torproject.org hosts. Generally, these services run under their dedicated role user, and you use sudo to switch to these roles. Up until now, you have used the LDAP password to authenticate to sudo. We want to change this. The LDAP password is the one you got sent in encrypted mail when your account was first created on db.torproject.org. You might have (should have) changed that on the web-interface [db]. This password is the one that also allows you to log into the management interface [db-login] there and change for instance your mail forwarding configuration or your jabber password [jabber-announce-mail]. The plan is to have a password dedicated to just sudo. To set it, please go to the user management website [db-login] (pick "Update my info"), and set a new (strong) sudo password for yourself. If you want, you can set a password that works for all the hosts that are managed by torproject-admin (*). Alternatively, or additionally, you can have per-host sudo passwords -- just select the appropriate host in the pull-down box. Once set on the web interface, you will have to confirm the new settings by sending a signed challenge to the mail interface. Please ensure you don't introduce any additional line breaks. Note that setting a sudo password will only enable you to use sudo to configured accounts on configured hosts. Consult the output of "sudo -l" if you don't know what you may do. (If you don't know, chances are you don't need to nor can use sudo.) For now, both the LDAP password and the new sudo password will work to authenticate to sudo. Starting in the second week of April, the LDAP password will no longer be accepted for this purpose. If you have any questions, please ask. Thanks, weasel [db] https://db.torproject.org/ [db-login] https://db.torproject.org/login.html [jabber-announce-mail] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2016-February/000064.html -- | .''`. ** Debian ** Peter Palfrader | : :' : The universal https://www.palfrader.org/ | `. `' Operating System | `- https://www.debian.org/

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Re: [tor-project] Tor at LibrePlanet 2016
by Nathan Freitas 22 Mar '16

22 Mar '16

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016, at 12:03 PM, David Goulet wrote: > LibrePlanet 2016 was last weekend and we were a couple of Tor people > there (I > won't list them since I didn't ask them before writing this email). > Please, > "other Tor people", feel free to add anything to this thread about what > happened there if you think it would be relevant. I am sorry I could not make it this year, as I was out of town on a family trip. Thank you so much for this report. > I would like to share one thing with all of you that I learned there. It+ > might > not be news to some of you but one part of it below was for me. Through the Guardian Project, we have had numerous interaction with activists, journalists, trainers and organizations based in or supporting communities in Mexico. The triple threat of corporations, government and cartels is real and dire, leaving pretty much no one, no rule of law, or process to trust. Often these various groups are infiltrated by one another, so you end up with mobile operators metadata or surveillance data being acquired by cartels through employees who sell it to them or are pressured into it. With all of this, I can understand how free software and services and projects like Tor must seem like real, tangible, critical allies, and am glad you could connect with them on this topic. > Anyway, I'll stop here. It was a great conference imo and I encourage > anyone > that can attend to do so next year. I'll be there! +n

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Tor at LibrePlanet 2016
by David Goulet 22 Mar '16

22 Mar '16

Hello Tor! LibrePlanet 2016 was last weekend and we were a couple of Tor people there (I won't list them since I didn't ask them before writing this email). Please, "other Tor people", feel free to add anything to this thread about what happened there if you think it would be relevant. I would like to share one thing with all of you that I learned there. It might not be news to some of you but one part of it below was for me. First, there was a talk from two activists from Mexico that deploy free software in indigenous communities, in states like Chiapas and other autonomous communities around Mexico. They build, install and teach those solutions. On the list of software they use, Tor was one of them (and Bitmask! shootout to our LEAP friends! :). After the talk, I went to talk to them on why it's being used for which it seems a _non_ optional software for them. They told me that all those communities around Mexico they work with face very important surveillance threat which sometimes have physical consequences for lots of people (you can imagine...). This comes from three different sources they explaines me. The first one is corporation. Those corp. are there for the massive natural ressources those regions have and they are regurlarly causing natural disasters so there are a lots of activists fighting that at the street level and at the legal level. Using Tor is essential so they evade corporate spying which is apparently intense. They can coordinate safely and do their legal research about those corporations in privacy. The second source of surveillance is, no surprise there, government which sleeps with those corporations and has a reach outside of the region that is country wide thus much more invasive in terms of surveillance. Again, Tor! The last one is the cartels. They explained to me that the cartels, in the region(s) they control, have infrastructure in place to spy on electronic devices and Internet communications. And you can also imagine that _they_ don't fuck around there when they catch someone doing something against their agenda. All in all, for them Tor is a matter of _survival_ and that is absolutely mandatory to their everyday life which is a suprising number of people in Mexico. Up to this day, it's been *years* they've been deploying those softwares around the country and continue to do so for which Tor is a core component. Those two activists were able to travel, talk about it and continue to do their work in part because of Tor (and of course other software like Tails, Bitmask, GPG, ...). It's really great to be honest, as a Tor developer, to get this kind of feedback and also understanding (well as best as possible since I never lived something like that) their situation and needs. Also, +9k for translation of our documentation and tools, English works fine for rich and powerful colonialist countries ;). I've also talked to people from https://about.commonsearch.org/ for which they have been "mining" a .onion address for weeks now to get a vanity one. They are behind CloudFlare because of the cost it saves them but will at least have a .onion for Tor users. We'll see where that goes... Mr. Stallman tried to convince me that TBB should be based on IceCat[1] and put me in contact with the maintainer... This all happened after I gave him "Fuck CloudFlare" stickers for which he was SO happy that he asked me more so he can put them everywhere he goes. (For those who don't know, he uses Tor _all_ the time and he is quite pissed about CloudFlare.) Anyway, I'll stop here. It was a great conference imo and I encourage anyone that can attend to do so next year. Cheers! David [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

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(FWD) Team-based structure (Vegas Plan, mark 2)
by Roger Dingledine 21 Mar '16

21 Mar '16

Hi Alison, Here's the mail from last summer, with the "new" (as of then) organization and coordination plan. Hopefully this will be useful to you in figuring out the past, present, and future for the community team. I am also cc'ing tor-project here, since there's nothing sekrit in the below mail, and we should get into the habit of publishing stuff that used to maybe be sensitive but now probably isn't. --Roger ----- Forwarded message from Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> ----- Date: Mon, 25 May 2015 09:02:22 -0400 From: Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu> To: tor-internal(a)lists.torproject.org Subject: Team-based structure (Vegas Plan, mark 2) Hi folks! In my last mail I mentioned the topic of org structure. In my mind the main goals we're trying to solve with a better-understood structure are: 1) Better communication and coordination, both inside the team and between teams. 2) Give everybody a home. That is, have a named person who can help you when you need help with something (there's a conflict between you and somebody, you need some specific resource to accomplish your tasks, you don't know what you should work on next, ...). With that in mind, here is one way we could divide up into teams: --------------------------------------------------------------------- Community team Kate Jake Harmony Leiah Nima Sebastian Network team Nick Yawning George Dgoulet Andrea Isis Aaron Gibson Applications team Mike Geko Pearl Crescent Arthur Nicolas Arlo Sukhbir Support team Measurement team Karsten Arturo Philipp Winter Virgil Operations team Tom Steve Sue Abt --------------------------------------------------------------------- Some observations to help you understand why I made these choices: - I called the community team that name rather than outreach or advocacy or communications because its focus is on our people, inside and out: communicating to them, learning from them, getting them involved in making more Tor. So it includes Tor Weekly News, making the website accessible, handling press, doing trainings and conferences and materials to go with that, and all forms of outreach. - The "network" team is what I would have called the "tor" team, but Nick used the word 'network' once so I'm using it here. This is the backend: the program called Tor, the pluggable transports, the bridge distribution, the network simulators, the scripts that support directory authorities, etc. - The applications team works on the programs that end users think of as Tor: Tor Browser, other apps that bundle Tor, the equivalents on Android/iOS, and builds and QA for these applications. This team also works on enabling users to actually use these applications: that includes phrases like UX design, documentation, making sure that users can find answers to common questions, and making sure that developers know which questions are common so they can prioritize them. - The measurement team mashes together metrics, OONI, badexit detection, onionoo and the community websites that draw from onionoo, and the research groups who care about our data. - And lastly, I put an explicit operations team on the list, even though it is small and probably doesn't have enough people on it to do everything it will want to do. But I realized that if I didn't list it, I would be reinforcing the assumption that "operations team" and "execdir" are synonyms. - There are other tiny and lonely teams that I didn't list. For example, we might imagine an "infrastructure team" with weasel and qbi on it. But I'm wary of loading our kind volunteer sysadmins down with the communication responsibilities of being their own team. I guess the other conclusion there is that we should sketch out which teams are missing now compared to the future well-functioning and better-balanced Tor, and figure out a plan and timeline for getting from here to there. - Some of the choices could easily have gone another way. For example, why is the badexit detection work in the measurement team, and not in the network team? Is Tails part of applications, or part of community? We'll need to adapt based on what's working and what isn't working. - There are many people and groups that I didn't list in the above. That doesn't mean we don't like you, or that you're less valuable than the people I did list. I mostly focused on the people who get paid in some way for this work. Many of our volunteers fit into multiple categories (e.g. Matt Finkel could be community, could be network, probably could be a third as well). I'll leave it to them which team they want to be their 'home', also keeping in mind that these don't need to be permanent decisions. So think of this as an opportunity to choose your own destiny. :) - You'll notice that Isabela and Roger aren't in the list. That's because I've signed us up to be facilitators of the whole process. Maybe that means you can think of us like being on every team? We should be careful of accidentally thinking of these two people as k+1 people each though. - You'll also notice that these teams are broken up by functionality and purpose, not by funders. So for example we don't have a SponsorR team, even though that project ties together many teams. So we're going to need to cooperate and coordinate between the teams to keep various funders happy. --------------------------------------------------------------------- How do the teams work? You'll notice I didn't call out 'team leaders' or 'managers' or the like. The goal, original Vegas plan style, is for each team to self-organize so it can fulfill its responsibilities. Some teams will pick a person to be their primary person. Other teams will divide up responsibilities, or trade off, or whatever works for them. That said, I did list a person at the top of each team who I'm hoping will be instrumental in leading the self-organizing. --------------------------------------------------------------------- What are the responsibilities of each team? That's something we should work through together. Here are some we might choose: - Keep everybody inside the team coordinated on what needs to be done, who's doing it, how it's going, etc. - Summarize for the other teams what your team is up to -- what you've done and what you want to do. - Summarize for your own team what the other teams are up to. That is, here is one way to solve the n-to-n communication scaling problem. - Solve problems inside your team when you can, and when you can't, escalate them to get help from the other teams. That is, part of the team responsibility is to help the other teams when they have problems they can't solve internally. As opposed to turning me into the central manager for everybody -- one day we might have a dedicated operations director who magically fills that role, but we're not there right now, and we're probably going to be happier if we're better at handling issues as a team of teams. - Maintain the roadmaps for your team, including brainstorming things you should do that funders would pay for, and helping to frame these for funders so it's clear why they should. Some teams will do their own grantwriting, whereas other teams aren't set up right now for being good at it themselves. I'd like to resist having a separate 'fundraising team', since that's a great way for teams to pretend that it's somebody else's problem. This topic also ties into our general "how we want to get funded" discussions -- in the future it can't all be writing grants. In the past we've gone to new funders with peripheral (experimental) projects, which has been risky because we don't always put the organizational resources behind them to ensure their success. I think our better strategy in the future is to do more fundraising by the core projects, and use this funding to do the peripheral experimental projects. For example, raise money for Tor Browser to generalize Tor Launcher to make it easier to build things like Tor Messenger. More on this topic later. - One thing that's missing in this plan is the more traditional "manager" roles: doing intra-team performance reviews, identifying when people aren't pulling their weight, working to resolve issues like this. I worry that doubling up the roles will, in Karsten's words, "change the character of the team idea from a supporting structure to a power structure." Is our best plan there to continue stalling until we get the operations team more up to speed? Input here would be great. (A supporting structure is still helpful here, because it gives more chances to answer the question "What is so-and-so doing?") Next week (June 4-6) some of us are getting together in Boston to discuss structure among other topics. Somebody from each team will be there. So please discuss amongst your team if there's some outcome or direction you want us to be sure to include. --Roger ----- End forwarded message -----

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(FWD) Submit to FOCI '16?
by Roger Dingledine 21 Mar '16

21 Mar '16

If you have been doing something exciting lately (I know many of you have!), consider writing it up as a FOCI submission. If you need help figuring out what to write, or what would be a good submission, etc, let me or others know and we'll try to help. Also if you've done a cool thing but don't have time to write it all up, you might be able to team up with some academics here who would help with the writing-up. See recent FOCI programs here: https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci15/workshop-program https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci14/workshop-program https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci13/workshop-program --Roger ----- Forwarded message from Prateek Mittal <pmittal(a)princeton.edu> ----- Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2016 17:03:16 -0400 From: Prateek Mittal <pmittal(a)princeton.edu> To: Roger Dingledine <arma(a)mit.edu>, Nick Mathewson <nickm(a)freehaven.net>, Mike Perry <mikeperry(a)fscked.org>, karsten(a)torproject.org Cc: Amir Houmansadr <amir(a)cs.umass.edu>, FOCI '16 Program Co-Chairs <foci16chairs(a)usenix.org>, Sandy Ordonez <sandra(a)opentechfund.org> Subject: Submit to FOCI '16? Hi Roger, Nick, Mike, Karsten, Hope things are well. Given exciting recent developments across the Tor ecosystem, we are writing to encourage you (and your colleagues) to submit your work to this year???s Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '16). FOCI 2016 will be co-located with USENIX Security in Austin, TX on August 8 2016. This year, we're looking for six-page papers on any aspect of freedom of communications on the Internet, ranging from technical research on circumventing or measuring censorship, to research at the intersection of policy, regulation, social science and law. (For example, new Tor mechanisms -- both planned and deployed, new threats facing Tor, and experience + roadmap papers could all be a great fit.) https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci16 <https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci16>The submission deadline is May 2. Also, if you know anybody else who should know about it, please help us spread the word. Thanks! Amir and Prateek (Co-Chairs) -- Prateek Mittal Assistant Professor Princeton University http://www.princeton.edu/~pmittal/ ----- End forwarded message -----

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A Statement from The Tor Project on Software Integrity and Apple
by Kate Krauss 21 Mar '16

21 Mar '16

A Statement from The Tor Project on Software Integrity and Apple The Tor Project exists to provide privacy and anonymity for millions of people, including human rights defenders across the globe whose lives depend on it. The strong encryption built into our software is essential for their safety. In an age when people have so little control over the information recorded about their lives, we believe that privacy is worth fighting for. We therefore stand with Apple to defend strong encryption and to oppose government pressure to weaken it. We will never backdoor our software. Our users face very serious threats. These users include bloggers reporting on drug violence in Latin America; dissidents in China, Russia, and the Middle East; police and military officers who use our software to keep themselves safe on the job; and LGBTI individuals who face persecution nearly everywhere. Even in Western societies, studies demonstrate that intelligence agencies such as the NSA are chilling dissent and silencing political discourse <http://m.jmq.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/02/25/1077699016630255.full.pdf…> merely through the threat of pervasive surveillance. For all of our users, their privacy is their security. And for all of them, that privacy depends upon the integrity of our software, and on strong cryptography. Any weakness introduced to help a particular government would inevitably be discovered and could be used against all of our users. The Tor Project employs several mechanisms to ensure the security and integrity of our software. Our primary product, the Tor Browser, is fully open source. Moreover, anyone can obtain our source code and produce bit-for-bit identical copies of the programs we distribute using Reproducible Builds <https://blog.torproject.org/blog/deterministic-builds-part-one-cyberwar-and…>, eliminating the possibility of single points of compromise or coercion in our software build process. The Tor Browser downloads its software updates anonymously using the Tor network, and update requests contain no identifying information that could be used to deliver targeted malicious updates <http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/02/most-software-already-has-a-golden-…> to specific users. These requests also use HTTPS encryption <https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https> and pinned HTTPS certificates (a security mechanism that allows HTTPS websites to resist being impersonated by an attacker by specifying exact cryptographic keys for sites). Finally, the updates themselves are also protected by strong cryptography, in the form of package-level cryptographic signatures (the Tor Project signs the update files themselves). This use of multiple independent cryptographic mechanisms and independent keys reduces the risk of single points of failure. The Tor Project has never received a legal demand to place a backdoor in its programs or source code, nor have we received any requests to hand over cryptographic signing material. This isn't surprising: we've been public about our "no backdoors, ever <https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#Backdoor>" stance, we've had clear public support from our friends at EFF and ACLU, and it's well-known that our open source engineering processes and distributed architecture make it hard to add a backdoor quietly. From an engineering perspective, our code review and open source development processes make it likely that such a backdoor would be quickly discovered. We are also currently accelerating the development of a vulnerability-reporting reward program to encourage external software developers to look for and report any vulnerabilities that affect our primary software products. The threats that Apple faces to hand over its cryptographic signing keys <http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/apple-fbi-source-code-signature/> to the US government (or to sign alternate versions of its software for the US government) are no different than threats of force or compromise that any of our developers or our volunteer network operators may face from any actor, governmental or not. For this reason, regardless of the outcome of the Apple decision, we are exploring further ways to eliminate single points of failure, so that even if a government or a criminal obtains our cryptographic keys, our distributed network and its users would be able to detect this fact and report it to us as a security issue. Like those at Apple <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-…>, several of our developers have already stated that they would rather resign than honor any request to introduce a backdoor or vulnerability into our software that could be used to harm our users. We look forward to making an official public statement on this commitment as the situation unfolds. However, since requests for backdoors or cryptographic key material so closely resemble many other forms of security failure, we remain committed to researching and developing engineering solutions to further mitigate these risks, regardless of their origin. We congratulate Apple on their commitment to the privacy and security of their users, and we admire their efforts to advance the debate over the right to privacy and security for all. -- Kate Krauss Director of Communications and Public Policy kate(a)torproject.org @TorProject 1-718-864-6647 (works for Signal also) PGP: CC0D 9B42 DE89 D4D0 619B A606 DDEB 3937 7D18 973B

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Tor Lecture at ANU
by Tim Wilson-Brown - teor 18 Mar '16

18 Mar '16

Hi, I've been invited to give a lecture about Tor to a Computer Networks class at The Australian National University (ANU). It's a class I took more than a decade ago, and I've kept in touch with the lecturer. This is the first time I've given a lecture on Tor. I've been asked to speak about Tor in general, browser fingerprinting, and single onion services. I was thinking of using some of the images from: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution <https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en#thesolution> https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en <https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en> I'm scheduled for next Thursday Australian time (which is Wednesday UTC / US time). Does anyone have any tips for giving a talk on Tor, or any other diagrams that would be useful for slides? Tim Tim Wilson-Brown (teor) teor2345 at gmail dot com PGP 968F094B teor at blah dot im OTR CAD08081 9755866D 89E2A06F E3558B7F B5A9D14F

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