[tor-bugs] #5011 [Pluggable transport]: Discuss possible designs for an external program that discovers bridge addresses to tell Tor about them

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#5011: Discuss possible designs for an external program that discovers bridge
addresses to tell Tor about them
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 Reporter:  karsten              |          Owner:  mikeperry                
     Type:  task                 |         Status:  new                      
 Priority:  normal               |      Milestone:  Sponsor F: March 15, 2012
Component:  Pluggable transport  |        Version:                           
 Keywords:                       |         Parent:  #5010                    
   Points:                       |   Actualpoints:                           
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Comment(by rransom):

 Replying to [comment:1 arma]:
 > Here's a concrete example that needs to be solved. Let's make sure we
 can solve this one well before generalizing the problem too far.
 >
 > One of our partners is writing a program, probably in C, that takes in a
 string that's too long to type, and outputs some bridge addresses. Let's
 call it BridgeFinder. The user starts with the string in a web browser
 page. BridgeFinder will do its own network interactions to learn its
 answers (so it's doing more than just parsing the string into answers).

 If BridgeFinder needs to perform network interactions before Tor connects
 to a bridge, it should probably be a pluggable transport instead.

 > So *something* needs to A) get that long string from the web browser to
 BridgeFinder, and B) get the bridge strings from BridgeFinder to Tor.

 Option 0 is to make that long string a valid Bridge line that tells Tor to
 invoke a pluggable transport.

 Option 0.5 is to make BridgeFinder a separate program, distributed and
 used separately from Tor and our bundles, which the user can paste the
 string into; that separate program then gives the user Bridge lines to
 paste into Tor's configuration.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5011#comment:3>
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