[tor-bugs] #6435 [Vidalia]: Add client-side pluggable transports support to Vidalia

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki torproject-admin at torproject.org
Sun Jul 22 13:22:05 UTC 2012


#6435: Add client-side pluggable transports support to Vidalia
---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  asn      |          Owner:  chiiph
     Type:  defect   |         Status:  new   
 Priority:  normal   |      Milestone:        
Component:  Vidalia  |        Version:        
 Keywords:           |         Parent:  #6434 
   Points:           |   Actualpoints:        
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Comment(by asn):

 Replying to [comment:2 chiiph]:
 > Vidalia right now accepts things like "obfs2 someip blabla" in the "add
 bridge" settings dialog. So we should try to keep it as simple as possible
 for the user.
 >
 > The ClientTransportPlugin line depends a lot on how Vidalia is
 distributed (say, TBB vs installation with a linux package manager). So my
 tendency here is to think this from two different sides:
 >
 > The software packager side:
 > - If you want to distribute Tor+SomeTransport+Vidalia, you need to do it
 with the proper torrc lines.
 >
 > The user side:
 > - If you want the usage to be simple, well, it's a complicated feature
 so ship presets and then the user puts "obfs2 etc" in the "add bridge"
 thingy and it just works.
 > - If you want use a particular transport, then you can have a plugin
 with all the weird things you can do with this, or just open the torrc
 editor and do it in there.
 >
 > My point here is, I imagine a person that doesn't even know what an IP
 is, they just can't access the internet, I don't imagine them
 understanding the idea of "transport". They only know they have to put
 this weird text in a configuration and it just works. So may be we should
 focus in distributing TBB with the proper presets and create a Vidalia
 plugin to do the advance stuff?

 I think this is a sound idea. I like the idea of focusing on ''easy''
 configuration with premade/preset transport configurations that the user
 can select for his bridges. This is also easy to do at the moment, since
 there are not many pluggable transports released.

 I still think that ''advanced'' configuration is important, but we can
 give it secondary focus for now. The fact that there are not many
 transports out there, makes ''advanced'' configuration not-super-useful
 for now. ''Advanced'' configuration being a Vidalia plugin sounds OK, if
 you think it will be helpful.

 Also, note that the ''advanced'' configuration I explained in comment:1 is
 '''not''' transport-specific. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if in the
 mid-term future there are pluggable transports that require from the user
 to tweak them (like, to input a shared secret) and that might require a
 transport-specific Vidalia plugin.

 PS: I wonder if the preset transport configurations should have obfsproxy
 with logging enabled. Having logs around will be quite helpful if any bugs
 appear.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6435#comment:3>
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