Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs: http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-10-26-15.57.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship --------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday, Nov 2 16:00 UTC Facilitator: shelikhoo

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

This week's Facilitator: meskio

== 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?sc... * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24 * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_nam...

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

* Fastly to block domain fronting in February 2024 https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2023-October/000... * azure is closing domain front support next month * there are some alternatives to domain fronting we could use (ampcache or tapdance), but it might be trickier to integrate with moat * cohosh will investigate if cnd77, netlify or akamai are alternatives we could use * let's stress tests ampcache using it in one of our default bridges * we can add metrics to the broker to know if the clients come from ampcache or domain front

* don't reject unrestricted client if there are no restricted proxies * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... * we'll merge it, it should not affect our deployment

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

* webtunnel testers call out: * https://forum.torproject.org/t/call-for-testers-webtunnel-a-new-way-to-bypas... * blog post of the sponsor 30 code audit * https://blog.torproject.org/security-audit-report-tor-browser-ooni/ * New paper PTPerf: On the Performance Evaluation of Tor Pluggable Transports: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3618257.3624817

== Reading group ==

* We will discuss "On Precisely Detecting Censorship Circumvention in Real-World Networks" on November 9 * https://www.robgjansen.com/publications/precisedetect-ndss2024.html * 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): 2023-10-26 Last week: - reviewed duplication fix for lox-distributor (lox!42) - deployed lox distributor, finally :) (rdsys#167) - updated rdsys survival guide - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Survival-Guid... - reviewed snowflake outbound proxy support (snowflake!200) - opened issue for regression in client since !182 - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - rebased lox tor browser UX integration to continue working on that This week: - fix snowflake regression (snowflake#40301) - lox tor browser UX integration - follow up on conjure reliability issues - visualize and write up some snowflake shadow simulation results Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-10-26 Last week: Next week: - revise encapsulation.ReadData redesign to return an error in the case of a short buffer https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker Before EOY 2023: - move snowflake-02 to new VM Help with:

meskio: 2023-10-26 Last week: - test the whatsapp bot (rdsys#147) - investiage a failure on telegram bot, was on applications side (onionsproutsbot#54) - some lox merge request reviews (lox!62 !68) Next week: - set up staging server for rdsys (rdsys#170)

Shelikhoo: 2023-10-26 Last Week: - [Merge Request Merged] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64) (continue) (https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...) - Work on snowflake performance improvement - Finialize alert for log collector https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/prometheus-alerts/-/merge_requests/37#... - [Merge Request Reviews] lots of... Next Week/TODO: - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL (continue) - Work on snowflake performance improvement - Merge request reviews

onyinyang: 2023-10-26 Last week(s): - Finalized a bunch of existing MRs including zkp crate fixes - these are now merged into lox! - Added to metrics, nearly finished This week: - Finish up metrics - Add functionality to handle blocked bridges in a single location for MVP - Start work on telegram distributor bot for Lox - Fix flakey test if time

(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 usable 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?