Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-11-14-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday, November 21 16:00 UTC Facilitator: shelikhoo ^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

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 projects, we are working on: * All needs review tickets: * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?sc... * Project 158 <-- meskio working on it * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_nam...

== Announcements ==

== Discussion ==

* Snowflake blocking in Russia November 2024 * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... * No apparent difference in DTLS handshakes between proxies that continue working and proxies that stop working. * Reports say that some proxies stop working, but only after transferring some traffic. * Hard to test because we can't easily control the proxy. It would be a good idea to set up a small test deployment to afford us more experimental control. * cohosh will work on that. * Traffic analysis fingerprinting? An old padding patch: https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/255#issuecomment-1566227484 * let's graduate rdsys to 1.0 * is more or less stable and since some months has replaced BridgeDB completelly * next release will be 1.0 * future of the snowflake broker * https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/anti-censorship-team@l... * we might need to start paying for the VM at elips.is from January * we can separate the broker from probetest, probetest doesn't see all clients only the proxies * the broker and the proxy are tied to the same domain name, we need first to separate them * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... DefaultBrokerURL = "https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/" DefaultNATProbeURL = "https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net:8443/probe" * meskio will look into funding options for the broker * on monday shelikhoo will start the move to the new broker * WebTunnel Server utility command interface * for certificate pinning we need to generate a hash of the certificate chain * there is no standard tooling for that, we need to extend webtunnel to do that * lets add a -gen-cert-fp flag

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

* "Measuring and analyzing node families in the Tor anonymous communication network" (Chinese) by Fang Binxing et al. 2015 * https://www.infocomm-journal.com/txxb/EN/10.11959/j.issn.1000-436x.2015036 * Tor family was focused on design and given a family-level measurement of it. Based on Tor node families (over 3000) discovered from live Tor network data (from Jan. 2011 to Dec. 2012), a few characteristics of Tor node families were revealed, such as family size, bandwidth, geographical distribution as well as operators providing a few big families. The analysis validated the irreplaceable role played by family design in enhancing Tor's anonymity. Based on the measurement, security analysis showed the serious availability threat a compromised node family can cause to the Tor network. Besides, It also discussed Tor hidden families and the potential anonymity risk caused by them.

== 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): 2024-11-14 Last week: - released new versions of snowflake and lyrebird - reviewed Troll Patrol MR (lox!263) - debugging the partial blocking of snowflake (snowflake#40407) - meek bridge handover tasks (anti-censorship/team#133) - Debugged problem with conjure deployment (conjure#44) - Removed vod.sport1.de from censorship settings front domains - reviewed MRs This week: - work with onyinyang on revisiting Lox BridgeTable fields and methods (lox#78) - follow up on snowflake blocking as we get more vantage point data - finish snowflake dependency upgrades that were causing problems - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147 Needs help with: dcf: 2024-11-14 Last week: -snowflake azure cdn bookkeeping https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-cos... - allocated resources for Debian 12 replacement snowflake broker https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - opened issue to remember to turn off the old Debian 10 broker https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... Next week: - comment on updates to unreliable snowflake transport 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 Help with: - tell me when to restart the brokers for https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf...

meskio: 2024-11-14 Last week: - review the status of the snowflake package dependencies (snowflake#40410) - remove race conditions in rdsys (rdsys#223) - fix email freezee in rdsys (rdsys#129) - release and deploy rdsys - inhibite ratio alerts (tpa/prometheus-alerts!60) Next week: - update snowflake proxy debian package

Shelikhoo: 2024-11-14 Last Week: - [Pending] snowflake broker update/reinstall(cont.): https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - [Awaiting Review] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... ) improvements - [Awaiting Input] Review CI: fix `latest` container image tag. https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - Update Snowflake dependencies: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/p... - Update Snowflake WebExtension Domain: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowf... - Logcollector anomaly investigate: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issu... - Merge request reviews Next Week/TODO: - Merge request reviews - Work on finishing snowflake container release(and fix the comments) - Vantage point deployment in Iran - Snowflake broker deployment

onyinyang: 2024-11-14 Last week(s): - Refactored MR for test distributor implementation into - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/274 - Now this can remain in the main branch and the test distributor can be deployed with the --features test-branch flag - wasm changes will remain on the testing branch while https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096#no... is being sorted. - Updated lox-zkp to account for thiserror upgrade that was causing artifact issues, fixed testing in lox-zkp - working on refactor of Lox (library) protocols to improve issuing efficiency as described in: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1552.pdf Next week: - Fix up Troll-patrol MR - Fix up wasm changes in https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/271 - Deploy test distributor - Continue work on improving issuer efficiency in Lox protocols - update lox protocols to return duplicate responses for an already seen request - Work on outstanding milestone issues: in particular: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/69 - key rotation automation Later: pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096): - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974 - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): - 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? theodorsm: 2024-10-24 Last weeks: - Adjusting to post-student life - Testing out beta releases of pion dtls and webrtc Next weeks: - Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls - Condensing thesis into paper Help with: - Feedback on thesis

Facilitator Queue: onyinyang meskio shelikhoo 1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting 2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue