[tor-project] Anti-censorship team monthly report: July 2019

[Philipp Winter]

Tor dev meeting
===============

* Many anti-censorship team members attended Tor's developer meeting.
  Here are the meeting notes of all censorship-related sessions:
  <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam#Tormeetingnotes>

* We talked to OONI and asked if they could measure the availability of
  STUN servers for us.  This would help with learning where snowflake is
  blocked:
  <https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/875>

* Started working on a "censorship table" that encodes what's necessary
  to get Tor to work in a given country (or autonomous system).
  Ultimately, Tor Browser should to use this table to help its users
  connect to the network while minimising user interaction:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/28531>

* Created a ticket for an easy-to-use Tor bridge meta Debian package:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/31153>  We hope to be done with this
  before our "set up new bridges" outreach campaign.

Snowflake
=========

* Deployed a proxy-go instance that uses the pion WebRTC library:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/28942>  We're evaluating if pion could
  replace libwebrtc for us.

* Started working on the web extension "infinite loop bug" that
  currently affects Firefox: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31100>

* Google's "Safe" Browsing system blocked snowflake's infrastructure
  domains *.bamsoftware.com.  This is a false positive that was
  apparently caused by an educational article:
  <https://www.bamsoftware.com/hacks/zipbomb/>
  We migrated to a new domain:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/31250#comment:13>

* Fixed <https://bugs.torproject.org/27385>
  (<https://snowflake.torproject.org/embed> is confusing).

* Started adding localisation to user-facing snowflake components:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/30310>

* Progress on easier-to-see snowflake icons in Firefox's dark mode:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/31170>

* Revised snowflake's project page:
  <https://snowflake.torproject.org>

Bridge operators
================

* Worked with bridge operators who had troubles getting obfs4 to work.

Pluggable transports
====================

* Started fixing a number of issues in our PT 1.0 spec.  Here is our
  canonical list of issues:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/29285#comment:5>
  Hopefully, there will be a way to merge these fixes with the PT 2.0
  spec.  Here's the in-progress feature branch:
  <https://dip.torproject.org/phw/torspec/tree/feature/29285>

* Added in-progress wiki page on retiring pluggable transports:
  <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/GuidelinesForRetiringPTs>

BridgeDB
========

* Deployed in-progress BridgeDB metrics feature branch which will give
  us insight into how BridgeDB is used:
  <https://bugs.torproject.org/9316>
  Found and fixed numerous bugs and eventually published first insights
  into BridgeDB metrics:
  <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-July/013953.html>

* Resurrected an old ticket to expose BridgeDB's assignments file again.
  This would allow bridge operators to see what bucket their bridge is
  in: <https://bugs.torproject.org/29480>

Miscellaneous
=============

* Reviewed a Tor Research Safety Board submission.

* Wrote a summary of the NDSS'17 paper "Dissecting Tor Bridges":
  <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2019-July/000023.html>

* Filed ticket to have a single Tor instance support, say, more than one
  obfs4 instance: <https://bugs.torproject.org/31228>

* Summarised the MASQUE circumvention protocol:
  <https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2019-July/000027.html>

* Cecylia attended the Citizen Lab's Summer Institute 2019 and PETS
  2019.

* Philipp will attend the OTF summit in Taiwan, and probably also
  potential pre and post events.