May 2023 - tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Are there countries where using Tor is illegal?
by Cristian Consonni 12 May '25

12 May '25

Hi, (Sorry if this question has already been asked in the past, feel free to point me to the relevant resources.) I know that the legal FAQs by the EFF state that: «we believe that running a Tor relay — including an exit relay that allows people to anonymously send and receive traffic — is legal under U.S. law.»[1] I also know there is a list of countries for which there is legislation that exclude communication service providers from liability. They are indicated in the Legal of the Tor Exit Guidelines page[2], they are USA, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, France, and Sweden. >From some articles in the press[3a][3b] it may be illegal - depending on how you interpret the wording[*] - to use Tor (and other technologies such as VPNs or proxies) in the UAE, with fines ranging in the millions of dirhams (hundreds of thousand of dollars). A couple of weeks ago it was discussed - on this list as well - that a law was introduced to the state parliament to ban Tor[4a][4b]. This follows a case of some months ago of a Russian Tor exit node operator being arrested for inciting mass riots and terrorism[4c][4d]. The idea of blocking VPNs or Tor seems to have already been considered in the past[4e]. This infographic about pluggable transports[5] suggests access to the Tor network is censored or limited in China, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Kazakhstan. Tor being censored orblocked may be different from it being illegal. What about other countries? Is there a place where I can find more about this topic? Cristian [1]: https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en [2]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorExitGuidelines [3a]: http://www.emirates247.com/news/emirates/dh500-000-fine-if-you-use-fraud-ip… [3b]: http://news.softpedia.com/news/people-caught-using-vpns-tor-or-proxies-in-t… [*]: «Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery» [4a]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-June/043293.html [4b]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22055 [4c]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2017-April/043109.html [4d]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/24/dmitry-bogatov-tor-russia/ [4e]; https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-and-tor-ban-looming-on-the-horizon-for-russia-… [5]: https://www.torproject.org/images/PT/2016-07-how-to-use-PT.png

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Snowflake tutorial notes
by Roger Dingledine 29 May '23

29 May '23

Hi folks, Micah and I did a session teaching people about Snowflake a few weeks back, and here are the notes that I wrote up for ourselves going into that session, in case they are useful to anybody in the future. (It was more of a decentralized peer-to-peer session so we don't have anything so organized as a slide deck.) It's separated into five main sections, with the goal that you can adapt how much time you spend on each section depending on the audience. Snowflake topics, 2023-05-15: (1) History and architecture Born out of the Flashproxy idea (PETS 2012), but Flashproxy didn't do nat piercing and didn't do webrtc <describe intuition around design> The basic idea is to handle DPI attacks by looking enough like WebRTC, and to handle IP enumeration attacks by having so many diverse and changing addresses that blocking them all is pointless. Started with Serene Han's OTF fellowship, then leaped forward again when we made an anti-censorship team and had Cecylia on it multiple components (more client interactions, more surface area for problems) - stun server for client to learn about connection info - domain front to reach broker - webrtc channel to volunteer proxy early engineering tradeoff: go-pion vs chrome's libwebrtc prateek at princeton wrote a short paper guessing some distinguishers that attackers could use. some of them turned out to be good guesses! used to use azure for the domain front, now use fastly Scaling to multiple snowflake back-end servers one in sweden one at umich now pushing >25terabytes/day of traffic (2) Real-world events - Russia censorship in Dec 2021 - spike in users, but block by webrtc DPI - Iran censorship in Oct 2022 - spike in users, but block by domain front https - #1 app in google play store, and also #2 app, for that day - China, works but sometimes quite slow - packet loss over the GFW leads to poor webrtc performance? ooni tests for snowflake, showing it working in most places including china (3) Ways to be a Snowflake volunteer - browser extension for Firefox, Chrome - and edge now? - headless go proxy for server people - Orbot has a 'kindness mode' - Brave ships the extension as of January - Mullvad considering something similar NAT piercing, kinds of volunteers >100k volunteers but the vast majority of them are the less useful kind gamifying the snowflake badge (4) developer side iptproxy wrapper in-process library for ios and android The Orbot 17.0 prerelease offers a better experience, since it is the first Orbot version to use snowflake-02 https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/releases/tag/17.0.0-RC-1-tor.0.4.7… reliability layers: - turbotunnel - conflux - striping over multiple snowflakes data channel vs media webrtc channel -- impacts both realism and reliability domain fronting isn't the only signaling channel we could use orbot ships with google amp cache as an alternative channel we could also use dnstt or other ideas in the future surprises, e.g. people in censored countries becoming snowflake volunteers (5) future work, funding, community Reusing our Snowflake volunteer pool for other projects? Too risky because whichever project draws the most attention blocks the snowflake pool for everybody else Besides, you really (should) want the distributed-trust features of Tor, to keep your users and your Snowflakes safe. how to handle enumeration attacks on the broker? tension between really simple broker and handling more attacks future work: realistic behavior layer a la Raven future work: better user counting We currently suffer from the same user (under)counting issues as Tor Funding groups to run Snowflake volunteers? part of otf rapid response plan for iran, short term maybe future plans to fund groups too? but centralizing our snowflakes kind of defeats the point Other ideas for growing the community, e.g. integrating Snowflake into your project

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Tor Browser weekly meeting rescheduled to 2023-05-30 @ 1500 UTC
by Richard Pospesel 26 May '23

26 May '23

Hello everyone, Monday 29th is an official holiday so we'll be moving our weekly meeting to the 30th at 1515 (not 1500) UTC in #tor-meeting on OFTC IRC. best, -Richard

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-25
by Shelikhoo 26 May '23

26 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-25-15.57.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, June 1 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126 * we will not include forward error correction * shelikhoo will do a test implementation * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliability with kcp * PT implementation version in the descriptors * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/11101 * Will be included in next Tor version (0.4.8???) * we'll need to update goptlib and the different PTs == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == Reading group == * We will discuss "" on * * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-05-25 Last week: - mostly away - foci stuff This week: - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - lox-wasm tor browser builds - catch up on gitlab todos Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-25 Last week: - did more analysis of blocking of the snowflake broker front domain in China https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… - upgraded snowflake-01 bridge to tor 0.4.7.13 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened a merge request to use IP_BIND_ADDRESS_NO_PORT in snowflake-server's localhost connections, necessary tor upgrade 0.4.7.13+ https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - migrated goptlib, meek, flashproxy, bundle, fog projects from gitolite to gitlab https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41182 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41190 - commented on interpreting Tor Metrics data https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/123#note_29… - participated more in discussion on shelikhoo's proposal for a new snowflake client–proxy protocol based on unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Help with: meskio: 2023-05-25 Last week: - fix rdsys handling webtunnel bridges (rdsys!126) - debug bridgedb webtunnel implementation (rdsys#142) - fix build errors of obfs4 in Tor Browser (obfs4#40011) - redesign the OnionSproutsBot deployment using plugins (onionsproutsbot#52) - review bridge flikering metrics in rdsys (rdsys!122) - review webtunnel IP for bridge line (webtunnel!9) Next week: - finish webtunnel rdsys support - migrate missing repos from git.tpo to gitlab (team#86) Shelikhoo: 2023-05-25 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Snowflake Performance Analysis (Ongoing, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Trying to fix vantage point (Ongoing) - Snowflake Performance Analysis - read & comments on papers Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis - Trying to fix vantage point (Ongoing) onyinyang: 2023-05-25 Last week: - Added tests for Lox library and worked on doing the same for Lox distributor - Refactored rdsys metrics changes to prevent risk of testing in deployment - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 - Met with Ian & Vecna (MMath student) on possible future research directions for Lox: - https://pad.riseup.net/p/lox-tor-stuff-keep - Sent a follow up email to provide more info about tooling/infrastructure that _does_ exist to inform about blocked bridges This week: - Still Adding tests Lox distributor - Finish up changes to rdsys: - metrics: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - more aggressive `gone` labelling to follow that being merged - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 - First change the vectors in the bridge_table to maps. (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice. Question: What makes a bridge useable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by pt, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) This week: - Continue working on rdsys#56 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/itchyonion/rdsys/-/tree/use-embedded-db?ref_t…) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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User support report for April 2023
by ebanam 24 May '23

24 May '23

Hello everyone! Here are updates from the user support team for last month (April, 2023). Most of our work has been around helping users in countries where Tor is censored and some user support work in light of the new stable Tor Browser release (Tor Browser 12.0.5). With the release of Mullvad Browser[0], we also published some documentation for our Support Portal[1]. Timeframe: 01 - 30 April 2023 # Frontdesk (email) -584 RT tickets created -428 RT tickets resolved Most frequent tickets by numbers: 1. 158 RT tickets: Private Bridge requests from China. 2. 39 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia. 3. 21 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan. 4. 4 RT tickets: Circumventing censorship with Tor in Iran. 5. 3 RT tickets: Tor Browser doesn't run with Mandatory ASLR on Windows (the issue is fixed with the 12.0.5 Tor Browser release)[2] # Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal Support channel -751 tickets resolved Breakdown: -697 tickets on Telegram -42 tickets on WhatsApp -12 tickets on Signal The most frequent tickets on cdr.link have been about: 1. 209 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Russia. 2. 137 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Turkmenistan. 3. 77 tickets: Circumventing censorship in Iran. 4. 39 tickets: Circumventing censorship in China. Thanks! e. [0]: https://blog.torproject.org/releasing-mullvad-browser/ [1]: https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/ [2]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/4…

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-18
by onyinyang 19 May '23

19 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-18-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 25 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Reported blocking of Snowflake in China since 2023-05-12 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… * https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/249 * https://forum.torproject.net/t/snowflake-bridge-does-not-work-in-china-sinc… * May have something to do with double rendezvous caused by having 2 bridge lines * "two or more TLS connections with the same SNI within a short time to a Fastly IP address" * got similar reports from two users * for one user the blocking threshold was 2 (https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/249#issuecomment-1547034480) for the other the threshold was 3 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss…) * Seems to have stopped since 2023-05-15 * List of mitigations at https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… * first step, if it happens again, is to specify just 1 bridge in Connection Assist for China * use snowflake-02 as it is currently more lightly loaded * Web browsers also make 2 or more near-simultaneous connections, maybe they were getting overblocked and that's why it stopped? * https://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.max-connections-per-server * Setting MaxConnsPerHost=1 in snowflake-client still does a double rendezvous, but to 2 *different* Fastly IP addresses rather than the some one twice. * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40578 was for two bridges already, so would not directly fix this case * "we could set numentryguards 1 for snowflake users i guess, but i think we want two" * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp * (Proposal under discussion, discuss on irc meeting next week) * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126 * Regarding bridge churn for Lox (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/lox-overview/-/wikis/…) * past research and source code on relay (not bridge) churn: * https://metrics.torproject.org/networkchurn.html * https://nymity.ch/sybilhunting/churn-values/ * https://www.cs.kau.se/philwint/spoiled_onions/ * https://nymity.ch/papers/pdf/winter2014a.pdf#page=22 == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == Reading group == * We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 * https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-05-18 Last week: - away - foci stuff - reviewed some Lox MRs - wrote up a Lox roadmap from meeting - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/lox-overview/-/wikis/… This week: - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-18 Last week: - did analysis of blocking of the snowflake broker front domain in China https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/iss… - commented on shelikhoo's proposal for a new snowflake client–proxy protocol based on unreliable data channels https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… Next week: - upgrade tor on snowflake-01 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Help with: meskio: 2023-05-18 Last week: - catching up after vacation - review rdsys metrics for flickering bridges (rdsys!122) Next week: - finish webtunnel rdsys support Shelikhoo: 2023-05-18 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) - Snowflake Performance Analysis (Ongoing, https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow…) - Trying to fix vantage point(Ongoing) - logcollector alert system(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measu… Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis onyinyang: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Finished up the Lox library changes to replace gone bridges with new bridges - Added tests and changes to Lox distributor to support this - Refactored lox-distributor for readability This week: - Adding tests for both Lox library and Lox distributor - Refactoring rdsys metrics changes to prevent risk of testing in deployment - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/merge_requests/122 - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice. Question: What makes a bridge useable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by pt, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? Needs Help with: - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally, but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Update: Not yet! but we are going to work on staging for this soon Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) This week: - Continue working on rdsys#56 (https://gitlab.torproject.org/itchyonion/rdsys/-/tree/use-embedded-db?ref_t…) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-11
by Shelikhoo 12 May '23

12 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-11-15.58.html And our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 18 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home * Past meeting notes can be found at: * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == * Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… * after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation * that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp * (NO update from shell @ May 11, research ongoing) * == Actions == * == Interesting links == * Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? * https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 * Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… * Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) * https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… == Reading group == * We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 * https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf * Questions to ask and goals to have: * What aspects of the paper are questionable? * Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? * Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? * Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-05-04 Last week: - tor meeting This week: - catch up on emails - foci stuff - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - go over lox notes again from meeting - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-05-11 (since 2023-04-20) Last week: - made a merge request to add an error check to the distinctcounter program https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - opened an issue to upgrade tor on snowflake-01 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - posted April 2023 snowflake-01 update https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-dail… - posted a history of pluggable transport placeholder IP addresses https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webt… Next week: - upgrade tor on snowflake-01 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Help with: meskio: 2023-04-20 Last week: - update PTs to use goptlib from gitlab.tpo - distribute bridges in rdsys even if there fewer than requested in the hashring (rdsys#162) - add webtunnel support to BridgeDB (rdsys#142) Next week: - tormeeting Shelikhoo: 2023-05-11 Last Week: - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - Research about designing an armored bridge line sharing URL format(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126) - Snowflake Performance Analysis(Ongoing) Next Week/TODO: - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - logcollector alert system - webtunnel document for proxy operator - Snowflake Performance Analysis onyinyang: 2023-05-11 Last week: - finished up implementing metrics to check on flickering resources and ratios observed (maybe) awaiting review - Worked through changes to handle `gone` resources. rdsys changes are tentatively implemented, Lox library changes are more hairy. This week: - Finished up the Lox library changes - Added additional changes to Lox distributor - Refactoring lox-distributor for readability - Adding tests for both Lox library and Lox distributor - Looking into a more reasonable way of storing Lox library data structures: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/2 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/onyinyang/lox/-/issues/3 (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice. Question: What makes a bridge useable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? e.g., by pt, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrified to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? Needs Help with: - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-11 Last week: - Work on team#112 (Some bridges are reported offline but are online and working) This week: - Continue investigating offline bridges (team#112) - Discovered bridgestrap#37 (cache gives wrong status of bridge sometimes) - Start working on rdsys#56 (persistent storage for certain bridge arributes) hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 09 May '23

09 May '23

Hello everyone! Long time no see! Here's your usual dose of sysadmin minutes, sorry for the late mail, we skipped a few... # Roll call: who's there and emergencies anarcat, gaba, kez, lavamind, no emergency apart from CiviCRM hogging a CPU but that has been happening for the last month or so # Dashboard review We went through our normal per-user, weekly, check-in: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&… We do not go through the general dashboards anymore as those are done in triage (by the star of the week for TPA, with gaba and anarcat for web). # Q2 prioritisation We looked at the coming deliverables, mostly on the web side of things: - developer portal - repo: force-push new HUGO site into https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/dev - staging: use pages for it until build pipeline is ready - triage/clean issues in web/dev (gaba) - edit/curate content (gaba) - review by TPO - send to production (maybe Q4 2023) - donation page (next project meeting is on May 17th) ~ kez working on it - self-host forum ~ wrapping up by the end of June - download page when ux team is done with it We also looked at the [TPA milestones][]. Out of those milestones, we hope for the [gnt-dal migration][] to be completed shortly. It's technically done, but there's still a bunch of cleanup work to be completed to close the milestone compeltely. Another item we want to start completing but that has a lot of collateral is the bullseye upgrade, as that includes upgrading Puppet, LDAP (!), Mailman (!!), possibly replacing Nagios, and so on. Anarcat also wants to push the gitolite retirement forward as that has been discussed in Costa Rican corridors and there's momentum on this now that a set of rewrite rules has been built... [gnt-dal migration]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones/2 [TPA milestones]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/tpa/-/milestones # Holidays planning We reviewed the summer schedule to make sure everything is up to date and there is not too much overlap. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 85, LDAP: 86, Prometheus exporters: 155 * number of Apache servers monitored: 33, hits per second: 658 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 9 * pending upgrades: 0, reboots: 2 * average load: 1.17, memory available: 3.31 TiB/4.45 TiB, running processes: 580 * disk free/total: 35.92 TiB/105.25 TiB * bytes sent: 306.33 MB/s, received: 198.85 MB/s * planned bullseye upgrades completion date: 2023-01-21 (!) * [GitLab tickets][]: 192 tickets including... * open: 0 * icebox: 143 * backlog: 22 * next: 16 * doing: 6 * needs information: 4 * needs review: 1 * (closed: 3121) [Gitlab tickets]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/boards Upgrade prediction graph lives at: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye/ Note that we're late in the bullseye upgrade procedure, but for the first time in months we've had significant progress with the retirement of a bunch of machines and rebuilding of existing ones. We're also starting to deploy our first bookworm machines now, although that is done only on a need-to basis as we can't actually *install* bookworm machines yet: they need to be installed with bullseye to get Puppet boostrapped and then we immediately upgrade to bookworm. A more detailed post-mortem of the upgrade process is under discussion in the wiki: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye#… -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

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cohosh's monthly status report, April 2023
by Cecylia Bocovich 06 May '23

06 May '23

Hi! This is my status report for contract work done in April 2023. # Reputation-based Bridge Distribution - Iterated on wasm target addition to rust project in tor-browser-build https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/merge_re… - Reviewed and merged work on the rdsys backend api rust library and lox-distributor # Conjure PT - Added basic CI to Conjure https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… - Added dependency bot to the Conjure project https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… - Opened an upstream issue to restore needed functionality in the newest version of tapdance https://github.com/refraction-networking/gotapdance/issues/113 - Properly close all opened SOCKS conns https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conj… # Snowflake Webextension - Added a Content Security Policy to manifest https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Released a new version of the web extension (v0.7.2) - Reviewed several merge requests

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Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-04
by Itchy Onion 05 May '23

05 May '23

Hey everyone! Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-04-15.59.log… And our meeting pad: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anti-censorship -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday, May 11 16:00 UTC Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress) == Goal of this meeting == Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community. == Links to Useful documents == - Our anti-censorship roadmap: - Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards - The anti-censorship team's wiki page: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home - Past meeting notes can be found at: - https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ - Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on: - All needs review tickets: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?s… - Sponsor 96 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 - Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it - https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad == Announcements == == Discussion == - Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation - that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp - (NO update from shell @ Apr 20) - goptlib now lives in gitlab.torproject.org == Actions == - read the safari snowflake extension code (team) - try to reach the developer (itchyonion will write an email draft, and the team will go over it) == Interesting links == - https://guardianproject.info/2023/03/04/arti-next-gen-tor-on-mobile/ - "Support for features like advanced censorship circumvention or onion services is not exactly straight forward on mobile operating systems, because they tend to be way more locked down than traditional computers. Currently, we can successfully test pluggable transports in 'managed' mode on old versions of Android. However this technique will likely not work on the latest version of Android and never worked iOS to begin with. We have shared our findings with the Arti developer team and hope they’ll work on getting us to full Pluggable Transports support, integraing with our existing IPtProxy Library soon." - Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store? - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940 - Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/0… == Reading group == - We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18 - https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf - Questions to ask and goals to have: - What aspects of the paper are questionable? - Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work? - Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work? - Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up? == Updates == Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week. Help with: - - Something you need help with. cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-05-04 Last week: - tor meeting This week: - catch up on emails - foci stuff - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics - go over lox notes again from meeting - lox-wasm tor browser builds Needs help with: dcf: 2023-04-20 - Last week: - - did a haproxy security upgrade on snowflake-01 and snowflake-01 bridges https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - - moved goptlib from git.torproject.org to gitlab.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2023-April/014829.html - - analyzed the rate of client_ip reporting since the release of snowflake-webext-0.7.2 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - Next week: - - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snow… - - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker - Help with: meskio: 2023-04-20 Last week: - - update PTs to use goptlib from gitlab.tpo - - distribute bridges in rdsys even if there fewer than requested in the hashring (rdsys#162) - - add webtunnel support to BridgeDB (rdsys#142) Next week: - - tormeeting Shelikhoo: 2023-05-04 Last Week: - - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) - - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/http… - - Finish all the accumulated task during in person meetup AFK Next Week/TODO: - - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue) - - Try to find a place to host another vantage point - - logcollector alert system - - webtunnel document for proxy operator - - Snowflake Performance Analysis - onyinyang: 2023-05-04 Last week: - Tor meeting This week: - - finished up implementing metrics to check on flickering resources and ratios observed (maybe) awaiting review - Working through changes to handle `gone` resources. rdsys changes are tentatively implemented, Lox library changes are more hairy. - (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): - https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep - - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice. - Question: What makes a bridge useable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people? - 1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider? - e.g., by pt, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrified to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?) - 2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less? Needs Help with: - - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out? Itchy Onion: 2023-05-04 Last week: - - Costa Rica This week: - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/112 (Some bridges are reported offline but are online and working) - - consulted network health team to understand what "offline" means from the Metrics's POV (and discovered a small wording inconsistency in their doc) - - better understood the difference between "offline" and working (they are not mutually exclusive) - hackerncoder: 2023-04-20 last week: - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake) - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity Next week: - work on "bridgetester"? - how does Iran block bridges?

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