Here's our meeting log:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-03-17.00.html

And here's our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad --------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday October 3rd 17:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 17:00 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: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards * Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets. * The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam * GetTor's roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor/boards * Tickets that need reviews: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&compo... * Projects 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

--------------------------- --- 3rd October 2019 --- ---------------------------

== Announcements ==

* Looks like our new default bridge (just started shipping in the new Tor Browser alpha) is already blocked by the GFW * Do we know whether it happened before or after the release? Before = source code inspection (and they know about the moved tor-browser-build.git repo); after could be source code inspection or package inspection or black-box testing. * Unfortunately not; I only tested it just now * Add the date and time you tested to MetricsTimeline, if you would. * I will! * Also most of our new bridgeDB bridges seem to be blocked: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/raw-attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-r... * Tor Browser files are appearing now at https://archive.org/details/@gettor for gettor purposes. * And also at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13CADQTsCwrGsIID09YQbNz2DfRMUoxUU

== Discussion ==

* What research questions can we think of that we should pitch to students? * Study BridgeDB crawling by setting up a variety of bridges (use tor's BridgeDistribution option) and check if they end up getting blocked. * Understand how and whether benign third parties are using/scraping Tor bridges. Research project sketch here: https://bugs.torproject.org/30636#comment:33 * Measure reachability of our snowflake broker (and bridge?) * Reverse-engineer/study a DPI system https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/15 * Understand what's happening with reported Shadowsocks blocking in China since mid September. Active probing? Large-scale flow analysis? * Understand the WebRTC fingerprint of pion-webrtc, in the style of https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake/Fingerprinting. * Evaluate effectiveness of obfs4's simplistic "slap some padding onto application data" approach * How does sharknado's packet-burst-breaking approach compare? * What is the the "right" packet sending schedule (assuming no restrictions on efficiency)? Where a schedule is an algorithm that outputs a sequence like "wait 50 ms, send 200 bytes, wait 4100 ms, send 1460 bytes, ..." Start by proposing a strawman schedule to give us something to work with. Ideally I would like to see an adversarial analysis: let one team develop a scheduler (using their own collected traffic), and a different team evaluate it (using their own collected traffic).

* torproject.org mirrors - what is the right strategy for accepting them? (conversation will continue in a ticket)

== Actions ==

*

== Interesting links ==

*

== Updates ==

FORMAT!

Name: This week: - What you worked on this week. Next week: - What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work). Help with: - Something you may need help with.

hiro: (2019-09-09)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets)

- gettor was down due to a VM reboot. Phw added a systemd script to reboot the service. - add archive.org - add gdrive - edit ansible scripts - edit scripts to upload files to various distribution endpoints

Next week - reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics - include reviews from code and website changes - review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs? - review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks.

Help with: - probably more reviews.

hiro: (2019-09-02)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets)

- Coded ansible recipes for gettor so that the service can be easily maintained by more people: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor-... - Fixing some issues about git history taking too much space quota on gitlab and github

Next week - use archive.org as new distribution endpoint: upload files to archive.org - reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics - review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs? - review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks.

Help with: - waiting to be told that's fine to upload files to archive.org? Can we start? - review new website. New website should be reviewed. https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor-...

phw: This week (2019-10-03): * Created missing tickets for sponsor 30 tasks * Took 10 random bridges from all three BridgeDB pools and sent them to cohosh for testing * More work on obfs4 improvements * Made obfs4 save client state (i.e., random value), and derive probability distributions from it * Interacted with new obfs4 bridge operators * Finished updating BridgeDB's requirements.txt and documented a process for keeping it up-to-date. * Wrote monthly anti-censorship team report. * Filed and implemented https://bugs.torproject.org/31903 to request new BridgeDB translations * Implemented first version of BridgeDB language switcher: https://bugs.torproject.org/26543 * Updated existing BridgeDB metrics files to match our updated metrics spec. Next week: * Finish prototype for obfs4 flow obfuscator * Figure out plan for how to reduce per-packet entropy Help with: *

Gaba: (updated October 3rd) Last week (): * sponsor 30 coordination This week (planned): * sponsor 30 triage of tickets * sponsor 30 meeting

ahf Last week: - Worked on #28930 This week: - Finished refactoring parts of #28930. Trying to figure out if we should begin the discussion on how PT's can report back on bootstrap info. - Continued to work on a tool to convert Trac tickets into Gitlab tickets.

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-10-03 Last week: - grant outline for meeting and set up gitlab repo for it - started new obfs4 tests - displayed preliminary results for obfs4: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-reach... - made major changes and squashed commits for sequencing layer (#29206) - helped sah with #31794 - started work on #31384 - so many reviews: #31391, #31685, #31537, #31780, #29484, #31794 - merged #31830, #31843 - talked with serna about #25598 This week: - make a patch for the proxy---broker communication (#29207) - more and better tests for #29206 (also related to #29259) - snowflake dogfood and think about how to address bad snowflake health - refactor proxy-pair state machine (#31310) - finish up #31384 - clear out any other september backlog - grant writing Help with: - review of #28942 and #29206 from dcf - feedback on whether the direction in #31384 is reasonable

catalyst: week of 09/19 (planned): - reviews - sponsor31 planning - coding style discussion - comment on draft network team review guidelines - #30984 week of 09/19 (actual): - reviews - sponsor31 planning - talking with people about proposed network team review processes week of 09/26 (planned): - reviews - sponsor31 doc coordination - checking in on Season of Docs work - #30984

arlolra: 2019-09-26 Last week: - mia Next week: - add a build step / documentation for code reuse in cupcake - pick up another ticket (looking at #31497, #31685, #31537, #31765, #31028, #31310) Help with: - review of #31391

dcf: 2019-10-03 Last week: - posted Turbo Tunnel candidate protocol evaluation https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/14 - posted summary of FOCI paper on meek traffic analysis https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/13 - filed tickets for Golang security upgrade (#31889, #31890) Next week: - catch up on Snowflake tickets - review #29206 (sequencing protocol for Snowflake) - review #29206 (pion WebRTC) - archive test pion builds from #28942 - migrate Snowflake broker to a datacenter with IPv6 (#29258) Help with: - Need BridgeDB and meek-azure to redeploy meek-server for #31890