[tor-bugs] #4625 [Analysis]: Figure out what to do with the FC paper proposing adaptive bridge address distribution

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#4625: Figure out what to do with the FC paper proposing adaptive bridge address
distribution
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 Reporter:  karsten   |          Owner:                           
     Type:  project   |         Status:  new                      
 Priority:  normal    |      Milestone:  Sponsor F: March 15, 2012
Component:  Analysis  |        Version:                           
 Keywords:            |         Parent:                           
   Points:            |   Actualpoints:                           
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 We had a deliverable for [wiki:org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year1 sponsor F year
 1] "analyze FC paper proposing adaptive bridge address distribution," and
 we left it in a good enough state for the milestone, but with more work to
 do.  The status on November 30 was:

 "There are four building blocks involved here: 1) A way to discover how
 much use a bridge is seeing from a given country: see the
 [https://metrics.torproject.org/papers/wecsr10.pdf WECSR10 paper] and
 [https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html usage graphs]. 2) A way to get
 fresh bridge addresses over time: see [https://blog.torproject.org/blog
 /strategies-getting-more-bridge-addresses this blog post]. 3) A way to
 discover when a bridge is blocked in a given country: see
 [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problem-five-ways-test-bridge-
 reachability this blog post]. 4) Distribution strategies that rely on
 different mechanisms to make enumeration difficult. The bottom of the
 bridge-testing blog post gives an overview of the Proximax idea. We've
 uncovered a further set of research questions that will need more
 attention in year2."

 I'm creating this ticket to remind us that there's still work to do. but
 not for the November 30, 2011 milestone.  From an IRC conversation on
 December 1, 2011:

 {{{
 12:47:40 < karsten> armadev: should I create a ticket "Figure out
                     what to do with the FC paper proposing adaptive
                     bridge address distribution," add the text from
                     the year1 page, assign it to the sponsor f march
                     2012 milestone, and call the year1 item done?
 12:48:25 < armadev> karsten: sure. except i'm not sure if we'll have
                     anything useful to say by march 2012, so we may
                     end up putting it off at that point.
 12:49:21 < armadev> karsten: a lot of it depends on how the "deploy
                     some bridge reachability testers" and "solve all
                     the bridge enumeration attacks" items go
 12:49:55 < armadev> karsten: since the whole proximax idea is based
                     on the premise that the only way for the
                     adversary to learn bridges is to get told them by
                     a corrupt or weak distribution channel
 12:50:57 < armadev> karsten: i haven't decided yet if the fact that
                     these other enumeration attacks are going to be
                     an ongoing problem is enough to kill the proximax
                     design, or just enough to slow it down.
 12:51:36 < armadev> for example, against an adversary who likes dpi,
                     it's a pretty dumb strategy
 12:51:58 < karsten> armadev: hmmm. would it make more sense for you
                     to create the ticket, rather than me creating it
                     and you correcting it?
 12:52:37 < armadev> just paste all of this into it and we can sort it
                     out later
 }}}

-- 
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