[tor-bugs] #18628 [Snowflake]: Devise some way for the browser proxy to forward metadata to the bridge before the OR data

Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki blackhole at torproject.org
Fri Mar 25 00:35:13 UTC 2016


#18628: Devise some way for the browser proxy to forward metadata to the bridge
before the OR data
---------------------------+-----------------
     Reporter:  arlolra    |      Owner:
         Type:  defect     |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium     |  Milestone:
    Component:  Snowflake  |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal     |   Keywords:
Actual Points:             |  Parent ID:
       Points:             |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:             |
---------------------------+-----------------
 > > What does a user in that graph refer to? A connection from a unique
 ip? Part of the Flashproxy/Snowflake model is that the proxies will be
 ephemeral (and hard to block) so a single user session may rotate through
 several proxies, corresponding to several unique ips. I can imagine that
 messing with the numbers.
 >>
 > Connections from multiple ephemeral IP address won't cause a problem for
 counting the total number of users. As Karsten says, that figure is driven
 by clients' consensus downloads, which aren't related to the specifics of
 the connection.
 >
 > What *will* get messed up is if we report the proxy IP addresses as if
 they were client IP addresses. Then we'll be counting the countries of the
 browser proxies, not of real users. My thinking was that for the time
 being, we just ignore that issue by not reporting an IP address through
 the ExtORPort. I.e.,
 >
 {{{
 pt.DialOr(&ptInfo, "", "snowflake")
 // https://godoc.org/git.torproject.org/pluggable-
 transports/goptlib.git#DialOr
 }}}
 >
 > In this way, we will not get per-country info, but the total number of
 snowflake users will be correct.
 >
 > In order to report true client IP addresses, we will need to devise some
 way for the browser proxy to forward that metadata to the bridge before
 the OR data.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18628>
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