[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-05-04

Itchy Onion itchyonion0518 at protonmail.com
Thu May 4 18:44:56 UTC 2023 


Hey everyone!



Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-05-04-15.59.log.html



And our meeting pad:

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-   THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD

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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, May 11 16:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the Tor Project and Tor community.

== Links to Useful documents ==


-   Our anti-censorship roadmap:

-   Roadmap: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards

-   The anti-censorship team's wiki page:

-   https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home

-   Past meeting notes can be found at:

-   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/

-   Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on:

-   All needs review tickets:

-   https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&assignee_id=None

-   Sponsor 96

-   https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24

-   Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel working on it

-   https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad


== Announcements ==


== Discussion ==


-   Update on Analysis of speed deficiency of Snowflake in China, 2023 Q1 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40251#note_2883879

-   after a lot of research the proposed solution is to enable datagram transport on webrtc to deal with the packet loss situation

-   that will convert webrtc into an unreliable channel, and snowflake will add reliablity with kcp

-   (NO update from shell @ Apr 20)



-   goptlib now lives in gitlab.torproject.org


== Actions ==


-   read the safari snowflake extension code (team)

-   try to reach the developer (itchyonion will write an email draft, and the team will go over it)


== Interesting links ==


-   https://guardianproject.info/2023/03/04/arti-next-gen-tor-on-mobile/

-   "Support for features like advanced censorship circumvention or onion services is not exactly straight forward on mobile operating systems, because they tend to be way more locked down than traditional computers.  Currently, we can successfully test pluggable transports in 'managed' mode on old versions of Android.  However this technique will likely not work on the latest version of Android and never worked iOS to begin with.  We have shared our findings with the Arti developer team and hope they’ll work on getting us to full Pluggable Transports support, integraing with our existing IPtProxy Library soon."

-   Unofficial(?) Snowflake extension for Safari in Apple App Store?

-   https://apps.apple.com/us/app/torproject-snowflake/id1597501940

-   Previously noted at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-February/000222.html


== Reading group ==


-   We will discuss "Lox: Protecting the Social Graph in Bridge Distribution" on 2023 May 18

-   https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/lox-popets23.pdf

-   Questions to ask and goals to have:

-   What aspects of the paper are questionable?

-   Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?

-   Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work?

-   Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up?



== Updates ==

Name:
    This week:
        - What you worked on this week.
    Next week:
        - What you are planning to work on next week.
    Help with:

-        - Something you need help with.


cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2023-05-04
Last week:
    - tor meeting
This week:
    - catch up on emails
    - foci stuff
    - open issue about archiving snowflake prometheus metrics
    - go over lox notes again from meeting
    - lox-wasm tor browser builds
Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-04-20

-   Last week:

-   - did a haproxy security upgrade on snowflake-01 and snowflake-01 bridges https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40268

-   - moved goptlib from git.torproject.org to gitlab.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2023-April/014829.html

-   - analyzed the rate of client_ip reporting since the release of snowflake-webext-0.7.2 https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/82#note_2896740

-   Next week:

-   - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40262#note_2886018

-   - parent: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40267

-   - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker

-   Help with:


meskio: 2023-04-20
   Last week:

-   - update PTs to use goptlib from gitlab.tpo

-   - distribute bridges in rdsys even if there fewer than requested in the hashring (rdsys#162)

-   - add webtunnel support to BridgeDB (rdsys#142)

   Next week:

-   - tormeeting


Shelikhoo: 2023-05-04
   Last Week:

-   - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64)

-   - [Research] HTTPT Planning https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/httpt/-/issues/1

-   - Finish all the accumulated task during in person meetup AFK

   Next Week/TODO:

-   - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue)

-   - Try to find a place to host another vantage point

-   - logcollector alert system

-   - webtunnel document for proxy operator

-   - Snowflake Performance Analysis

-   

    


onyinyang: 2023-05-04
    Last week:
        - Tor meeting
    This week:

-   - finished up implementing metrics to check on flickering resources and ratios observed (maybe) awaiting review

     - Working through changes to handle `gone` resources. rdsys changes are tentatively implemented, Lox library changes are more hairy.


-   (long term things were discussed at the meeting!):

-   https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep

-   - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are distributed/use in practice.

-   Question: What makes a bridge useable for a given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the most appropriate resources to people?

-   1. Are there some obvious grouping strategies that we can already consider?

-    e.g., by pt, by bandwidth (lower bandwidth bridges sacrified to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)

-   2. Does it make sense to group 3 bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted users have access to 1)? More? Less?

    Needs Help with:

-   - figuring out whether or not the metrics I added to rdsys actually collect what we want them to. I can run prometheus locally but am unsure how to match this with a realistic onbasca test that can actually show whether the metrics are useful/correct. Is there a known way to do such tests other than deploy and find out?


Itchy Onion: 2023-05-04
    Last week:

-   - Costa Rica

    This week:
     - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/112 (Some bridges are reported offline but are online and working)

-   - consulted network health team to understand what "offline" means from the Metrics's POV (and discovered a small wording inconsistency in their doc)

-   - better understood the difference between "offline" and working (they are not mutually exclusive)

-   

    


hackerncoder: 2023-04-20
    last week:
        - (py-)ooni-exporter torsf (snowflake)
        - (py-)ooni-exporter web_connectivity
    Next week:
       - work on "bridgetester"?
       - how does Iran block bridges?
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