[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 3 Oct 2019
Philipp Winter
phw at torproject.org
Thu Oct 3 17:56:06 UTC 2019
Here's our meeting log:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2019/tor-meeting.2019-10-03-17.00.html
And here's our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------
Next meeting: Thursday October 3rd 17:00 UTC
Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 17:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC (channel is logged while meetings are in progress).
== Goal of this meeting ==
Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor.
== Links to Useful documents ==
* Our anti-censorship roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/roadmap/boards
* Our roadmap consists of a subset of trac tickets.
* The anti-censorship team's wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/teams/AntiCensorshipTeam
* GetTor's roadmap: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor/boards
* Tickets that need reviews: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?status=needs_review&component=%5eCircumvention&col=id&col=summary&col=component&col=owner&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=reviewer&order=priority
* Projects from sponsors we are working on:
* https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor30
* https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Sponsor28
---------------------------
--- 3rd October 2019 ---
---------------------------
== Announcements ==
* Looks like our new default bridge (just started shipping in the new Tor Browser alpha) is already blocked by the GFW
* Do we know whether it happened before or after the release? Before = source code inspection (and they know about the moved tor-browser-build.git repo); after could be source code inspection or package inspection or black-box testing.
* Unfortunately not; I only tested it just now
* Add the date and time you tested to MetricsTimeline, if you would.
* I will!
* Also most of our new bridgeDB bridges seem to be blocked: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/raw-attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-reachability-2019-10-03.pdf
* Tor Browser files are appearing now at https://archive.org/details/@gettor for gettor purposes.
* And also at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13CADQTsCwrGsIID09YQbNz2DfRMUoxUU
== Discussion ==
* What research questions can we think of that we should pitch to students?
* Study BridgeDB crawling by setting up a variety of bridges (use tor's BridgeDistribution option) and check if they end up getting blocked.
* Understand how and whether benign third parties are using/scraping Tor bridges. Research project sketch here: https://bugs.torproject.org/30636#comment:33
* Measure reachability of our snowflake broker (and bridge?)
* Reverse-engineer/study a DPI system https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/15
* Understand what's happening with reported Shadowsocks blocking in China since mid September. Active probing? Large-scale flow analysis?
* Understand the WebRTC fingerprint of pion-webrtc, in the style of https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake/Fingerprinting.
* Evaluate effectiveness of obfs4's simplistic "slap some padding onto application data" approach
* How does sharknado's packet-burst-breaking approach compare?
* What is the the "right" packet sending schedule (assuming no restrictions on efficiency)? Where a schedule is an algorithm that outputs a sequence like "wait 50 ms, send 200 bytes, wait 4100 ms, send 1460 bytes, ..." Start by proposing a strawman schedule to give us something to work with. Ideally I would like to see an adversarial analysis: let one team develop a scheduler (using their own collected traffic), and a different team evaluate it (using their own collected traffic).
* torproject.org mirrors - what is the right strategy for accepting them? (conversation will continue in a ticket)
== Actions ==
*
== Interesting links ==
*
== Updates ==
FORMAT!
Name:
This week:
- What you worked on this week.
Next week:
- What you are planning to work on next week (related to anti-censorship work).
Help with:
- Something you may need help with.
hiro: (2019-09-09)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets)
- gettor was down due to a VM reboot. Phw added a systemd script to reboot the service.
- add archive.org
- add gdrive
- edit ansible scripts
- edit scripts to upload files to various distribution endpoints
Next week
- reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics
- include reviews from code and website changes
- review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs?
- review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks.
Help with:
- probably more reviews.
hiro: (2019-09-02)(gettor days are Thursday - snippets https://dip.torproject.org/snippets)
- Coded ansible recipes for gettor so that the service can be easily maintained by more people: https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor-ansible
- Fixing some issues about git history taking too much space quota on gitlab and github
Next week
- use archive.org as new distribution endpoint: upload files to archive.org
- reach out to irl about sending gettor stats to metrics
- review specs: are specs up-to-date? should we change something in the specs?
- review docs: write documentation for web site and ansible playbooks.
Help with:
- waiting to be told that's fine to upload files to archive.org? Can we start?
- review new website. New website should be reviewed. https://dip.torproject.org/torproject/anti-censorship/gettor-project/gettor-web
phw:
This week (2019-10-03):
* Created missing tickets for sponsor 30 tasks
* Took 10 random bridges from all three BridgeDB pools and sent them to cohosh for testing
* More work on obfs4 improvements
* Made obfs4 save client state (i.e., random value), and derive probability distributions from it
* Interacted with new obfs4 bridge operators
* Finished updating BridgeDB's requirements.txt and documented a process for keeping it up-to-date.
* Wrote monthly anti-censorship team report.
* Filed and implemented https://bugs.torproject.org/31903 to request new BridgeDB translations
* Implemented first version of BridgeDB language switcher: https://bugs.torproject.org/26543
* Updated existing BridgeDB metrics files to match our updated metrics spec.
Next week:
* Finish prototype for obfs4 flow obfuscator
* Figure out plan for how to reduce per-packet entropy
Help with:
*
Gaba: (updated October 3rd)
Last week ():
* sponsor 30 coordination
This week (planned):
* sponsor 30 triage of tickets
* sponsor 30 meeting
ahf
Last week:
- Worked on #28930
This week:
- Finished refactoring parts of #28930. Trying to figure out if we should begin the discussion on how PT's can report back on bootstrap info.
- Continued to work on a tool to convert Trac tickets into Gitlab tickets.
cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2019-10-03
Last week:
- grant outline for meeting and set up gitlab repo for it
- started new obfs4 tests
- displayed preliminary results for obfs4: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/31701/obfs4-reachability-2019-10-03.pdf
- made major changes and squashed commits for sequencing layer (#29206)
- helped sah with #31794
- started work on #31384
- so many reviews: #31391, #31685, #31537, #31780, #29484, #31794
- merged #31830, #31843
- talked with serna about #25598
This week:
- make a patch for the proxy---broker communication (#29207)
- more and better tests for #29206 (also related to #29259)
- snowflake dogfood and think about how to address bad snowflake health
- refactor proxy-pair state machine (#31310)
- finish up #31384
- clear out any other september backlog
- grant writing
Help with:
- review of #28942 and #29206 from dcf
- feedback on whether the direction in #31384 is reasonable
catalyst:
week of 09/19 (planned):
- reviews
- sponsor31 planning
- coding style discussion
- comment on draft network team review guidelines
- #30984
week of 09/19 (actual):
- reviews
- sponsor31 planning
- talking with people about proposed network team review processes
week of 09/26 (planned):
- reviews
- sponsor31 doc coordination
- checking in on Season of Docs work
- #30984
arlolra: 2019-09-26
Last week:
- mia
Next week:
- add a build step / documentation for code reuse in cupcake
- pick up another ticket (looking at #31497, #31685, #31537, #31765, #31028, #31310)
Help with:
- review of #31391
dcf: 2019-10-03
Last week:
- posted Turbo Tunnel candidate protocol evaluation https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/14
- posted summary of FOCI paper on meek traffic analysis https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/13
- filed tickets for Golang security upgrade (#31889, #31890)
Next week:
- catch up on Snowflake tickets
- review #29206 (sequencing protocol for Snowflake)
- review #29206 (pion WebRTC)
- archive test pion builds from #28942
- migrate Snowflake broker to a datacenter with IPv6 (#29258)
Help with:
- Need BridgeDB and meek-azure to redeploy meek-server for #31890
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