- tor-project - lists.torproject.org

Tails report for May 2020
by intrigeri 11 Jun '20

11 Jun '20

Hi, here's the Tails report for May 2020: https://tails.boum.org/news/report_2020_05/ For convenience's sake, I'm attaching a simplified HTML version. Cheers!

1 0

minutes from the sysadmin meeting
by Antoine Beaupré 10 Jun '20

10 Jun '20

# Roll call: who's there and emergencies Present: anarcat, hiro, weasel. Small emergency with Gitlab. ## Gitlab We realized that the GitLab backups were not functionning properly because GitLab omnibus runs its own database server, separate from the one ran by TPA. In the long term, we want to fix this, but in the short term, the following should be done: 1. that it works without filling up the disk ;) (probably just a matter of rotating the backups) 2. that it backs up *everything* (including secrets) 3. that it stores the backup files *offsite* (maybe using bacula) 4. that it is documented The following actions were undertaken: * make new (rotating disk) volume to store backups, mount it some place (weasel; done) * tell bacula to ignore the rest of gitlab /var/opt/.nobackup in puppet (hiro; done) * make the (rotating) cronjob in puppet, including the secrets in ./gitlab-rails/etc (hiro, anarcat; done) * document ALL THE THINGS (anarcat) - specifically in a new page somewhere under [tsa/howto/backup][], along with more generic gitlab documentation ([34425][]) [tsa/howto/backup]: https://help.torproject.org/tsa/howto/backup/ [34425]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/34425 # Roadmap review We proceeded with a review of the [May and June roadmap][]. [May and June roadmap]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/SysadminTeam#May We note that this roadmap system will go away after the gitlab migration, after which point we will experiment with various gitlab tools (most notably the "Boards" feature) to organize work. alex will ask hiro or weasel to put trac offline, we keep filing tickets in Trac until then. weasel has taken on the kvm/ganeti migration: * [moly](https://bugs.torproject.org/29974) * [majus](https://bugs.torproject.org/31784) * [kvm5](https://bugs.torproject.org/33084) hiro will try creating the next ganeti node to get experience on that [34304][]. [34304]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/34304 anarcat should work on documentation, examples: * how to add a disk on a ganeti node (done) * [LDAP / ud-ldap][] * [gitlab][] [LDAP / ud-ldap]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/34426 [gitlab]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/34425 # Availability planning We are thinking of setting up an alternating schedule where hiro would be available Monday to Wednesday and anarcat from Wednesday to Friday, but we're unsure this will be possible. We might just do it on a week by week basis instead. We also note that anarcat will become fully unavailable for two months starting anywhere between now and mid-july, which deeply affects the roadmap above. Mainly, anarcat will focus on documentation and avoid large projects. # Other discussions We discussed TPA-RFC-2, "support policy" ([tsa/policy/tpa-rfc-2-support][]), during the meeting, because someone asked if they could contact us over signal (the answer is "no"). [tsa/policy/tpa-rfc-2-support]: https://help.torproject.org/tsa/policy/tpa-rfc-2-support/ The policy seemed to be consistent with what people in the meeting expected and it will be sent for approval to tor-internal shortly. # Next meeting TBD. First wednesday in July is a bank holiday in Canada so it's not a good match. # Metrics of the month * hosts in Puppet: 74, LDAP: 77, Prometheus exporters: 128 * number of apache servers monitored: 29, hits per second: 163 * number of nginx servers: 2, hits per second: 2, hit ratio: 0.88 * number of self-hosted nameservers: 6, mail servers: 12 * pending upgrades: 35, reboots: 48 * average load: 0.55, memory available: 346.14 GiB/952.95 GiB, running processes: 428 * bytes sent: 207.17 MB/s, received: 111.78 MB/s * planned buster upgrades completion date: 2020-08-18 Upgrade prediction graph still lives at https://help.torproject.org/tsa/howto/upgrades/ Now also available as the main Grafana dashboard. Head to <https://grafana.torproject.org/>, change the time period to 30 days, and wait a while for results to render. -- Antoine Beaupré torproject.org system administration

1 0

Tor Browser meetings start happening again on June 15th at 18UTC in irc
by Gaba 10 Jun '20

10 Jun '20

Hi! We are switching to have an open Tor Browser meeting in irc once a week. We are going to be discussing the releases there every 2 weeks and will be coordinating the migration from Fennec to Fenix's project every week. Meetings will be every Monday at 18UTC. Next one is on June 15th in irc.oftc.net #tor-meeting. The meeting pad for 2020 is at: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-tbb-2020-keep cheers, gaba -- she/her are my pronouns GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19

1 0

Network meeting notes, 8th June 2020
by Gaba 08 Jun '20

08 Jun '20

Hi! Network meetings are still happening every Monday at 1700UTC on #tor-meeting in irc.oftc.net We had a meeting on June 8th and here are the logs and notes. Log: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-06-08-17.00.log… Pad: http://kfahv6wfkbezjyg4r6mlhpmieydbebr5vkok5r34ya464gqz6c44bnyd.onion/p/tor… Contents of the pad: == Network meeting pad! == Next meeting is at Monday 15 June 1700 UTC on #tor-meeting on OFTC. June Schedule: * Monday 8 June 17:00 UTC * Monday 15 June 17:00 UTC Welcome to our meeting! We meet each month at: Mondays at 1700 UTC On #tor-meeting on OFTC. (This channel is logged while meetings are in progress.) (See https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2017-September/001459.ht… for background.) Want to participate? Awesome! Here's what to do: 1. If you have updates, enter them below, under your name. 2. If you see anything you want to talk about in your updates, put them in boldface! 3. Show up to the IRC meeting and say hi! After each week's meetings, the contents of this pad will be sent to tor-project @ lists.torproject.org. After that is done, the pad can be used for the next week. == Previous notes == (Search the tor-project mailing list archive for older notes.) 23 March: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-April/002804.html 1 April - 4 May: we skipped meetings while transitioning TPI 1 June: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2020-June/002857.html == Stuff to do every week == Let's check and update our roadmap: What's done, and what's coming up? Any change? All the trac tickets for the roadmap are in the team's page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam S28 & S30 - Continue after October - Ahf S55 - Nickm Non sponsor stuff DoS defenses = Dgoulet + Asn Library Size reduction = Ahf + Dgoulet sbws = Ahf + Juga Check reviewer assignments! How reviews from last week worked? Any blocker? Here are the outstanding reviews, oldest first, including sbws: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&componen… Go over our 0.4.4 status page at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/NetworkTeam/CoreTor… . (If maint-0.4.4 were released as stable tomorrow, what would we regret?) - scheduled to enter feature freeze on Monday June 15th == Reminders == * Remember to "/me status: foo" at least once daily. * Remember that our current code reviews should be done by end-of-week. * Make sure you are in touch with everybody with whom you are doing work for the next releases. * Check other's people call for help in their entries. Volunteers need help. Please help them when you are around. Maybe we should have times of day when different people are responders, and expectations of who helps. ------------------------------- ---- 8 June 2020 ------------------------------- == Announcements [please date] == == Discussion [please date] == (june 8th) IPv6 next project? - https://pad.riseup.net/p/wz-qyMOxEypdd6XF0xKA to do or not to do who? * Trac->gitlab migration questions: * Need to send out announcement email asap * repo structure? === Active Proposed Policies === * Pull Request Guidelines (stalled) === Design proposals under discussion === 315: require more fields in directory documents (still waiting [6/1]) 316: flashflow (asn and nickm are reviewing, should schedule discussion with pastly. [5/18]) 317: dns (under discussion on ML [5/18]) 318: limit protovers (waiting for more commment; needs discussion [6/1]) 319: wide everything (nick replied on ml; waiting for more discussion [6/1]) 320: tap out again - Do we have a consensus to replace this with a "deprecate v2 onion services" proposal? If so, who writes it? [6/1] protover rethinking (teor's email to tor-dev) (nick needs to reply [5/18]) 321: happy families (need feedback [6/1]) 322: dirport linkspec (need feedback [6/1]) == Recommended links == == Updates == Name: Week of XYZ (planned): - What you planned for last week. Week of XYZ (actual): - What you did last week. Week of ABC (planned): - What you're planning to do this week. Help with: - Something you may need help with. PLEASE DO NOT BULK-DELETE THE OLD ENTRIES! Leave the "Planned" parts! Leave the parts for last week and this week! Nick: Week of 1 Jun (planned): - Send out walking onions proposal once copy-edit is done. - Ramp on on S55. - Catch up on all emails - Catch up with all review/merge - Finish triage! - look at jenkins status - can I fix coverity? if not, open a ticket. - opine on gitlab/trac stuff - advance proposal discussions - summarize code-format status, ask for team decision. Week of 1 Jun (actual): - Sent out walking onions proposal - Got to inbox-6 - Review and merge - Discussed triage; went through possible triage remaining on 0.4.4 - tried to advance proposal discussions and summarize code-format status. got team consensus. - Read through all pending S55 code - Discussed a couple of proposals Week of 8 Jun (planned): - Prepare for 0.4.4 freeze - Merge pending S55 code, and increase my command of the remaining work on O1.1 - Talk with Metrics about S55 stuff? - S69 wrap-up email - Tor-unspecified triage: wow do we need it - Code-formatting hacking. ahf (afk today due to public holiday): Week of 25/05 planned: - Look into how we can start + connect to the Tor process in Fenix. - Onion-Location docs. - Get merging to tor.git. Week of 25/5 actually: - Fenix and OrbotService integration. - Onion-Location docs with Anto. Week of 1/6 planned: - Gitlab session at all hands. - Continued Fenix work. Week of 1/6 actually: - Continued Fenix work: Trying to figure out a build-issue with Fenix/Kotlin and Tor's Android service. Week of 8/6 planned: - Work with the Admin team on Gitlab migration. - As much other things as I can squeze in while waiting for different batch tasks to complete. Focus on Fenix still. asn: [Public holiday here today. Probs offline.] Week of 25/05 (actual): - Big backlog - Reviews & merges. - More reviews of proposal310 (guards) - 044 bugfixes: Started testing some fixes on #32040. - Start catching up on PoW thread. Week of 01/06 (planned): - Reply on all the recent responses on PoW thread -- lots of work done there. - Publish fix for #32040. - Merge prop#310 patch. jnewsome: Week of May 4 (actual): - Some LD_PRELOAD behavior investigation to guide shadow-Phantom design decisions - Added more tests covering next-to-be-implemented shadow-Phantom syscalls - Mentored/reviewed a volunteer PR - Kickoff OnionPerf meeting Week of May 11 (planned): - Start digging into OnionPerf - Start familiarizing myself with Shadow *usage* for Tor simulations - tor-project@ Shadow update email Week of May 11 (actual): - Worked on improving Shadow logging framework - Helped volunteer get their PR to improve tests into mergeable shape and merged - Started poking at OnionPerf Week of May 18 (planned): - tor-project@ shadow update email - finish logging improvement PR - More digging into OnionPerf. #33974: update to tgen 1.0 \o/ Week of June 1 (actual): - Added GH milestones and issues in shadow/shadow - Sent out Tor Project update - Added more thread/interposition APIs in shadow/phantom to support more syscalls. - Did some straceing to identify more syscalls we need for tor Week of June 8 (planned): - Hand off OnionPerf work for now (#33974: update to tgen 1.0) - Identify more syscalls needed to simulate Tor. (use nm/objdump; chutney; src/lib/sandbox) - Figure out (how to avoid implementing) netlink - Check whether we already can interpose Tor's name lookups (via libevent) pastly: Week of 18 May (planned): - Finish bones of external FlashFlow repo (python?) to control tor clients that perform FF measurements - Finish bones of little-t tor changes s.t. measurement can be performed - Discuss FlashFlow with network team devs as they have questions c: Week of May 25 (planned): - close up work on #33609 - get started on other s55 tickets, potentially knock out 'easy' ones first and take it from there - update https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/gsoc with my information Week of May 25 (actual): - #33609 ready for review - started hunting down and working on other Sponsor55-can and -must issues - talking in #tor-project about wiki Week of June 1 (actual): - opened and made #34381 ready for review - IPv4 part of #32888 Week of June 8 (planned): - #33598 - IPv6 part of #32888 <-- do you have a ticket for it? -- she/her are my pronouns GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19

1 0

Planet Testing
by Alexander Færøy 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

Hello Core Tor Members, (This email was also sent to tor-internal@ some days ago, but it is not secret, so we can share it here as well. Feel free to ignore if you have already read it) Antonela made progress on a theme for a "Planet Tor" blog aggregator over the weekend. We still need to tune a few things, but we can do that over the next weeks or so. We are looking for some core Tor members who occasionally write about Tor stuff on their blogs. Right now, all articles should be in English, but we can later add an aggregator for posts in other languages, too, if there is an interest in that. Please reply directly to me (not a list reply) with the following information if you are interested: 1. Your name formatted in the way you want it listed. 2. Your nickname (if any) formatted in the way you want it listed. 3. A link to your blog's "front page." 4. A link to your blog's RSS and/or Atom feed. If you have a Tor specific "category" or "tag" and your blog engine supports it, you can give us a direct link to that feed such that "only" things you tag explicitly with Tor will show up here. Up to you. 5. (optionally) A link to your Twitter handle. 6. (optionally) A link to your Mastodon handle. Thanks! Antonela and I will continue to experiment a bit with this over the next period of time. The repository for the work can be found at https://gitlab.torproject.org/ahf/planet and is tracked in https://bugs.torproject.org/9721 Have a nice weekend! All the best, Alex. -- Alexander Færøy

1 1

Anti-censorship meeting notes, 04 Jun 2020
by Philipp Winter 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

Hi all, Here are our meeting minutes: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-06-04-15.59.html And here is our meeting pad: Anti-censorship work meeting pad -------------------------------- Next meeting: Thursday June 4th 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 checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor. Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor. == Links to Useful documents == * Our anti-censorship roadmap: * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets on keyword #anti-censorship-roadmap-2020 * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * Past meeting notes can be found at: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/ * GetTor's roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-proj… * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on: * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30 * https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28 * Anti-censorship related tickets that we want other teams to fix: * https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-anti-censorship-tickets-keep == Announcements == * Will be migrating from Trac to Gitlab soon: gitlab.torproject.org * You cannot (yet?) create an account on your own but we'll have one created for everyone. == Discussion == * Generalising wolpertinger as a potential BridgeDB successor? * Distributors (HTTPS, Email, Moat, Salmon, Wolpertinger) * Resources (Bridges, Tor Browser links, maybe even snowflake proxies?) * Matchmakers (connects distributors with resources) == Actions == * == Interesting links == * GFW reportedly blocks Chrome TLS fingerprint * https://github.com/refraction-networking/utls/issues/45 == Reading group == * We will discuss V2Ray and VMess on June 11 * https://v2ray.com/en/ * https://www.v2ray.com/en/configuration/protocols/vmess.html * https://github.com/v2ray/manual/blob/master/eng_en/protocols/vmess.md * 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. phw: This week (2020-06-05): * Reviewed #34286. * Filed #34322. * Closed #30152 because we're using monit now. * Wrote a patch for #19774 because that's what really matters! * Published BridgeDB release blog post and monthly team report post. * Messed around with autoresponder tests for both GetTor and BridgeDB because we still get the occasional false postive. * Tried to improve fix for #33835. Still needs some work. * Wrapped up first version of BridgeDB's internal metrics in #31422. * More polishing of wolpertinger. * Thought about generalising it to a potential BridgeDB successor, and how one would go about that. Next week: * Help with: * #19774 (adds favicon to bridgedb) * #31422 (internal bridgedb metrics) cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2020-06-04 Last week: - tested snowflake on Android (#30318) - abandoned idea of doing NAT behaviour discovery at the proxy (#34129, #34358) - reviewed some snowflake-mobile code - discussed traffic replacement with researchers at galois - started looking at bridgedb email distributor to see how we can reuse some of it for GetTor This week: - look at viatsk's work on NAT test suite (#25595) - look at BridgeDB's email responder code and see if there's an uninvasive way to integrate GetTor (#3780) - implement NAT behaviour discovery at client and use it match up proxies (#34129, #33666) - Follow up on discussions of debian obfs4proxy package - translations? Needs help with: juggy : This week: - Dig into the algorithm for how BridgeDB distributes bridges Next week: - Implement audio captchas in moat, figure out how to reduce audio captcha request size - Keep studying BridgeDB to write architectural overview Help with: arlolra: 2020-05-07 Last week: - webext repo versioning / publishing #34140, #34126, #34132, #34127 Next week: - follow ups to #33365 - start on #31201 Help with: - dcf: 2020-06-04 Last week: Next week: - check with Kyle about snowflake fingerprinting results - share access to the snowflake broker CDN configuration (#30510) Help with: agix:2020-06-04 Last week: -Finished work on #27984 and submitted patch Next week: -Look for and dig into a new ticket Help with: -Review of #27984 thymbahutymba: 2020-04-02 Last week: - CI/CD pipeline for multiarch docker images, which has a problem with the apt tor version even though the apt repository have been changed into the Dockerfile. Next week: Help with: HashikD: 2020-04-28 Last week: - Established the WebRTC connection. (in Test project) - Fixed the issue with connectoin termination. (in Test project) - Sending some temporary data to test the connection. (in Test project) - Finished #34308 (closed) creating new project - Finished and commented on #34264, #34307 (merge_ready) Next week: - Getting my merge requests accepted and acting up on feedback of code. Help with:

1 0

Metrics meeting notes, June 4th 2020
by Gaba 04 Jun '20

04 Jun '20

Hi! Metrics Meetings are happening every Thursday at 15UTC in #tor-meeting in irc.oftc.net Here are the minutes for the meeting of June 4rd: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2020/tor-meeting.2020-06-04-15.00.log… Meeting pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-metricsteam-2020.1-keep And here is the pad notes: ----------------------------------------------------- Agenda Thursday, June 4th, 15 UTC ----------------------------------------------------- OnionPerf project: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor59 Roadmap for June: Roadmap draft: https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/scalability-and-performance… What tasks are we missing in this roadmap draft? There are some tickets in Metrics/Cloud #33309->33313;#32725 Write some simple scripts to generate ID hexes of relays with certain properties as input for #33260. What should we include in the roadmap for the 4 weeks in June from 2020-06-05 to 2020-07-02 with 2.5 points per week or 10.0 points total capacity? Tickets that are almost done and that we can likely resolve quickly Add CDF-DL graph (#33257), 0.2 points remaining +1+1+1 Fix message logging and filtering (#29369), 0.2 points remaining +1+1+1 Make -o/-i arguments mutually exclusive (#34316), 0.1 points remaining +1+1+1 Find out why onion service measurements have gotten slower (#34303), 0.1 points remaining +1+1+1 Analyze unusual distribution of time to extend to first hop in circuit (#34257), 0.4 points remaining +1+1+1 Add digests and sizes to index.xml (#29365), 0.2 points remaining +1+1+1 Add single onion service mode (#29368), 0.2 points remaining +1+1+1 Enhancements related to TGen and Shadow Update OnionPerf to TGen 1.0.0 (#33974), 2.0 points remaining+1+1+1 Circuit build timeouts Add CBT events to Onionperf result files (#33420), 0.7 points remaining +1 Include more events about CBT in results (#33422), 0.5 points remaining +1 Long-running measurement instances Update metrics-web to only plot "official" data (#33397), 0.5 points remaining+1 Check OnionPerf instances from Nagios (#28271), 1.0 points remaining+1 Guards Measure static guard nodes with OnionPerf (#33399), 1.9 points remaining +1+1 Track which Guard is used for experimental measurements (#33421), 3.0 points remaining +1+1 Measurement mode Measure mode with arbitrary tgen traffic models (#29370), 0.9 points remaining +1+1 Multiple downloads for oneshot mode (#33432), 0.2 points remaining +1+1 What we're leaving for the next roadmap in July: Enhancements related to TGen and Shadow OnionPerf TGen parser needs reworking (#30362), 3.0 points remaining Replace TorCtlParser with OnionTrace's control log parser (#34213), 2.0 points remaining Long-running measurement instances Add new metadata fields and definitions (#33391), 1.0 points remaining Add new metadata fields to json output (#33392), 0.5 points remaining Guards Add analysis to support static guard measurements (#33419), 2.0 points remaining Measurement mode Develop and deploy tgen model resembling ping (#30798), 5.0 points remaining TGen/Tor integration Document and maybe improve how we're mapping TGen transfers to Tor streams/circuits (#34231), 1.0 points remaining Visualization mode Store measurements in a local database to reduce plotting time (#33259), 5.0 points remaining Split PROXY errors into whatever reasons are given in TorCtl logs (#34218), 0.3 points remaining Add option to filter graphed OnionPerf results by relay fingerprint (#33260), 3.0 points remaining New suggestions from above: There are some tickets in Metrics/Cloud #33309->33313;#32725 Write some simple scripts to generate ID hexes of relays with certain properties as input for #33260. Tickets that needs reviewers: #29365, #33076, #33257 Anything that people want to bring? Anybody block on anything? -- she/her are my pronouns GPG Fingerprint EE3F DF5C AD91 643C 21BE 8370 180D B06C 59CA BD19

1 0

Tor Community Portal: Feedback from the Digital Security Helpline
by Beatrice Martini 02 Jun '20

02 Jun '20

Dear Tor Project Team, My name is Beatrice Martini, and I am the Education Coordinator of the Access Now Digital Security Helpline. Nice to e-connect! I am writing you to share my most positive feedback on your new Tor Community Portal. Congratulations on the launch and thank you for your great work! It is truly a brilliant resource, and I was glad to share it with the rest of the Helpline Team. In particular, I very much appreciated the Training section, and the detailed information regarding the training (and its follow-up!), best practices, code of conduct and tips on risk assessment. I think that both experienced and newer information security trainers will find these resources extremely helpful. Thanks again! I am looking forward to learning more about upcoming developments of the Community Portal. Best, Beatrice -- Beatrice Martini Education Coordinator Digital Security Helpline Access Now | <https://www.accessnow.org/help> PGP fingerprint: F94F 205E A3E4 6979 E719 8D16 0C5F 23FF 7D5B 5AEC <https://pronoun.is/she> * Subscribe to the Access Now Express <https://www.accessnow.org/express>, our weekly newsletter on digital rights * RightsCon Costa Rica has been postponed <https://www.rightscon.org/covid-19-update-rightscon-costa-rica-postponed-un…> until 2021 – stay up to date via the RightsCon Rundown <https://www.rightscon.org/rundown/>

2 1

Anti-censorship team monthly report: May 2020
by Philipp Winter 01 Jun '20

01 Jun '20

Hi all, Here's what the anti-censorship team has been up to in May 2020: Snowflake ========= * Tor Browser 9.5a13, released on May 22, has a major usability improvement in Snowflake that makes it possible to migrate a connection to a new temporary proxy when the one you are using goes offline. This makes it more likely that a Snowflake connection will work in the first place, and lets Snowflake be used for a longer time. <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-tor-browser-95a13> <https://bugs.torproject.org/34043> * Started a GSoC project to implement an Android Snowflake proxy app. <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/SnowflakeProxyAndroid> * Started implementing workarounds for NAT incompatibility between snowflake proxies and clients. <https://bugs.torproject.org/34129> * Implemented Android reproducible build of snowflake clients. <https://bugs.torproject.org/28672> * Fixed a bug that resulted in Chrome proxies hanging. <https://bugs.torproject.org/31278> GetTor ====== * Fixed a problem where GetTor got into an infinite email loop with other autoresponders. <https://bugs.torproject.org/34286> * Fixed some bugs in the GetTor twitter responder, bringing it closer to being fixed. <https://bugs.torproject.org/27330> BridgeDB ======== * Made steady progress on wolpertinger, which helps BridgeDB build a feedback loop with OONI (and potentially other censorship measurement platforms). OONI finished its part of the implementation, and can now request bridges from wolpertinger's API. Wolpertinger then fetches OONI's test results from its S3 bucket and writes them back to BridgeDB's SQLite database. <https://bugs.torproject.org/32740> <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/wolpertinger> * Summarised plans for BridgeDB's future: <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2020-May/000096…> * Wrote a blog post on our most recent BridgeDB 0.10.1 release: <https://blog.torproject.org/new-release-bridgedb-010-1> * Finished monitoring tool that periodically sends email to BridgeDB's autoresponder to make sure that it's still working. <https://bugs.torproject.org/12802> * Removed "chatspeak" references across BridgeDB's UI. <https://bugs.torproject.org/31528> * Extended BridgeDB's minimalistic SQL table for blocked bridges. <https://bugs.torproject.org/34154> * Updated BridgeDB's user interface with the latest translations from Transifex. Thanks to everyone who helped translate BridgeDB to different languages! * Fixed a bug that would break BridgeDB's email autoresponder after a while. <https://bugs.torproject.org/33945> Miscellaneous ============= * Set up a monit instance that now monitors our anti-censorship infrastructure. Outage alerts are sent to the anti-censorship-alerts mailing list. <https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/monit-configuration> <https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-alerts> * Updated our bridge setup guide for docker after a user pointed out an issue. <https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/bridge/docker/>

1 0

Sponsor 38 update (Shadow simulator)
by Jim Newsome 01 Jun '20

01 Jun '20

Sponsor 38: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor38 We've been primarily focused on prototyping the new process-based simulation architecture https://github.com/shadow/shadow/milestone/16: - General libc + syscall interposition plumbing is fairly stable now, including marshaling pointer arguments across the Shadow/Plugin process boundary, in both the ptrace and the LD_PRELOAD interposition mechanisms. - Settled on a logging design and implemented it. In particular we needed to address the problem of logging from our "shim" code that's LD_PRELOADed into the plugin's process. Since it's no longer in Shadow's process, we can't directly use Shadow's logger, which references internal Shadow data structures and in-memory queues. To further complicate things, some code runs both inside Shadow and inside the LD_PRELOADed library, and that code should use Shadow's logger when and only when running inside Shadow. We developed a simple plugabble logger that writes to stdout by default, uses Shadow's logging when running inside Shadow, and a "shim logger" when running inside the LD_PRELOADed shim. This also allows us to use the same logging API inside tests and support libraries. - We've gotten more syscalls and parts of libc implemented, including syscalls from unistd.h and most of the socket.h syscalls. These are the basic interfaces used by almost every network program to handle communication and file descriptor i/o. We are nearly ready to start running some multi-process networking benchmarks. We've also made some general improvements on the public Shadow branch https://github.com/shadow/shadow/pulls?page=2&q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed+updated…: - Added both debug and release builds to our continuous integration test matrix, helping us catch more bugs before they get merged. - Got rid of the monolithic shadow.h header, substantially speeding up incremental builds, and improving compatibility with code analysis tools. - Documentation cleanup and additions, including adding contributor guidelines. - Reduced flakiness in multi-process networking tests by moving away from hard-coded server ports. - Added additional integration tests to cover functionality being implemented in the new process-based model. - Migrated from Python 2 to 3. We also spent some time strategizing about how to use Github "milestones" and "issues" to help us plan and prioritize development work and to keep the community updated on our progress. We are still in the early stages and hope to make more effective use of these planning tools over time. Finally, we're thrilled to welcome Steve Engler to the project. Steve is starting today: Monday, June 1.

1 0