[anti-censorship-team] Crash in Snowflake users since 2021-01-17

Eric Burger ewb25 at georgetown.edu
Wed Jan 20 23:23:05 UTC 2021


Not to be overly paranoid, but if a bunch of thought to be OK proxies disappear and a bunch of mystery proxies pop up around the same time, my first thought would be an attempt to insert a bunch of malicious machines in the middle.

—
Sent from a small device with autoerror

> On Jan 20, 2021, at 3:18 PM, Cecylia Bocovich <cohosh at torproject.org> wrote:
> 
> I'm still pretty sure that the complete drop off of snowflake users has
> to do with Tor Browser crashing when configured to use the default
> snowflake bridge.
> 
> But, I did notice some other weird behaviour. The number of unrestricted
> snowflake proxies dropped off at around the same time (and the number of
> unknown proxies rose dramatically). This should not affect most users (I
> have been able to bootstrap Tor fully using snowflake with the same
> torrc configurations options that Tor Browser uses). However, it is
> weird. I'm not sure yet of the cause, and it could be a coincidence that
> these two events coincided.
> 
> See https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40030#note_2722730
> 
>> On 2021-01-19 12:59 p.m., Cecylia Bocovich wrote:
>> Hi David,
>> 
>> I'm able to use snowflake on the command line, but not in Tor Browser.
>> This seems to be due to this bug:
>> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/40282
>> 
>> I'm a bit surprised that it took so long for the issue to be reflected
>> in snowflake statistics, I also hadn't run across it myself until I
>> tried to change my Tor Browser config after reading this email. Philipp
>> and I are talking with the browser and core tor developers about a fix.
>> I'm a little surprised we are only finding out about this now. But, it
>> seems to not be an issue with Snowflake itself.
>> 
>> Cecylia
>> 
>>> On 2021-01-18 11:30 p.m., David Fifield wrote:
>>> I happened to look at the Snowflake bridge's bandwidth and user history
>>> page, and the counts are close to zero since yesterday. I haven't
>>> investigated it at all.
>>> 
>>> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6915AB06BFB7F
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> anti-censorship-team mailing list
>>> anti-censorship-team at lists.torproject.org
>>> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-team
>> _______________________________________________
>> anti-censorship-team mailing list
>> anti-censorship-team at lists.torproject.org
>> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-team
> _______________________________________________
> anti-censorship-team mailing list
> anti-censorship-team at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/anti-censorship-team



More information about the anti-censorship-team mailing list