[anti-censorship-team] TorCloak Pluggable Transport

[Diogo Barradas]

Thank you again for all the details and suggestions!

We’ll keep you posted on our advances and work towards
integrating TorCloak with Tor in the near future.

Best,
Diogo

> On Sep 1, 2022, at 18:18, meskio <meskio at sindominio.net> wrote:
> 
> Quoting David Fifield (2022-09-01 16:18:27)
>> On Fri, Aug 26, 2022 at 06:07:35PM +0100, Francisco Silva via anti-censorship-team wrote:
>>> We are now coming to a stage on our project in which we are discussing
>>> solutions to disseminate our bridges. In the attached file we present a small
>>> draft of our proposed solution. This solution is geared towards leveraging the
>>> bridge distribution infrastructure already made available by the Tor project
>>> and make the process of establishing a bridge connection as simple as possible
>>> for the user.
>> 
>> You can make the bridge report extra arguments to tor, tor will publish
>> those arguments in the bridge's extra-info descriptor, and then they
>> will be made part of the bridge line when people get bridges from
>> BridgeDB. In goptlib, you report such argument using the SmethodArgs
>> function:
>> https://pkg.go.dev/git.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/goptlib.git#SmethodArgs
>> For example, obfs4proxy uses SmethodArgs to communicate the "cert"
>> parameter of bridge lines:
>> https://gitlab.com/yawning/obfs4/-/blob/77af0cba934d73c4baeb709560bcfc9a9fbc661c/obfs4proxy/obfs4proxy.go#L209
>> 
>> It will probably require some coordination to add TorClock to list of
>> known transports (e.g. in the dropdown at https://bridges.torproject.org/options/,
>> in the email responder), if that's how you imagine TorClock bridges
>> being distributed.
>> 
>> BridgeDB is probably not agile enough to handle something like automatic
>> rotation of chatroom IDs. It's more suited to long-term stable
>> identifiers. FYI, BridgeDB is now based on a backend called rdsys:
>> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys
>> https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-project-new-bridgedb-version-using-rdsys/2335
>> I believe one of the ideas behind rdsys was to enable not only long-term
>> stable bridges like BridgeDB, but also fast-changing ones like the
>> Snowflake proxy pool. But Snowflake proxies are currently still handled
>> using a separate and unrelated system. meskio has more knowledge of
>> rdsys.
> 
> Today in the anti-censorship meeting we have being discussing this. And thought 
> it was better for TorCloak to have its own broker than extending BridgeDB to 
> support it. Clients could send the room and password to the borker and the 
> broker connect them to a bridge. The broker could use domain fronting to avoid 
> being blocked.
> 
> Good luck with TorCloak, and keep us posted :)
> 
> -- 
> meskio | https://meskio.net/
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> My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
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> Nos vamos a Croatan.