[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-02-29

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-02-29-15.57.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

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Next meeting: Thursday, March 7 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: onyinyang

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

This week's Facilitator: meskio

== 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:Development · Boards · Anti-censorship · GitLab
  * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
    * Home · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
  * Past meeting notes can be found at:
    * The tor-project Archives
  * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors, we are working on:
    * All needs review tickets:
      * Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
    * Sponsor 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
      * Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet · The Tor Project · GitLab
    * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
      * Issues · Anti-censorship · GitLab

== Announcements ==
- Ireland Constitution Amendment Referendum: March 8th

Anything to note?
  * Belarus - General elections (2024-02-25): OONI Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT)
  * Cambodia - Senate election (2024-02-25): OONI Measurement Aggregation Toolkit (MAT)

== Discussion ==

  * Mysterious reported snowflake issue in China has maybe gone away as of 2024-02-26? But reportedly still slow/unreliable Default Snowflake bridges in Tor browser 13.0.9 is Blocked in China since around 2024-01-12 · Issue #325 · net4people/bbs · GitHub
    * looks like we can reproduce the issue: recentResult_cnnext · dc663e36d7dc81467a63f59c5d435b9f93e9e3ab · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Connectivity Measurement / BridgeStatus · GitLab
    * shelikhoo will investigate when time is available
  * Unclear whether AWS will allow public disclosure of credentials
    * AWS warning about public IAM credentials for SQS rendezvous (#40337) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    * we are waiting for their response
  
== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

  *

== Reading group ==
  * We will discuss "" on
    *
    * 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): 2024-02-29
  Last week:
      - released v2.9.1 for snowflake
      - merged shadow ci integration tests for snowflake
          - Add integration testing with shadow (!242) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - responded to AWS warning about public disclosure of credentials
          - AWS warning about public IAM credentials for SQS rendezvous (#40337) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - set up a cdn77 endpoint for meek
      - worked on snowflake webext source code instructions for 0.7.3 rejection
          - 0.7.3 rejected from mozilla (#89) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake WebExtension · GitLab
  This week:
      - continue following up on AWS support case
      - review lox synchronization fix
      - compile a list of next-steps for lox
      - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully upstream changes
      - tor-browser-build updates for lox wasm + bindings generation
      - Conjure bridge maintenance
      - more testing of available domain fronts
  Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-02-29
  Last week:
    - archived snowflake-webext-0.7.3 https://archive.org/details/snowflake-webextension-0.7.3
    - rebased Commits · handshake-padding · David Fifield / Snowflake · GitLab and for testers in China
  Next week:
    - review draft MR for unreliable data channels Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake (!219) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors is nonzero Deploy snowflake-server for QueuePacketConn buffer reuse fix (#40260) (#40262) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - parent: Improve bug discovery process (#40267) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
    - move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:

meskio: 2023-02-29
    Last week:
        - email tor-relays to request bridges for lox (lox#56)
        - mark bridges with local addresses as dysfunciontional in rdsys (rdsys!270)
        - get the version number from git in lyrebird (lyrebird!31)
        - try and fail to use iptables to bloc local connections from bridgestrap
    Next week:
        - moat distributor in rdsys

Shelikhoo: 2024-02-29
    Last Week:
        - [Merge Request]HTTPS distributors in rdsys: Implement HTTPS distributor in rdsys (!260) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab
        - [Research] Inspect Snowflake Situation In China
        - Update WebTunnel Container Image(Best practices for update webtunnel in production (#30) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / WebTunnel · GitLab)
        - Merge request reviews
    Next Week/TODO:
        - Inspect Snowflake Situation In China and create ticket for that
        - Create Issue for "Merging webtunnel + lyrebird"

onyinyang: 2023-02-29
  Last week(s):
    - continued prep for HACS/DRL meeting
    - Thought about/work on other Lox test deployment milestone pieces
      -Lox Ready for Open Testing Call · Milestones · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
      - worked on better invitation encoding issue: Better Invitation Encoding (#58) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab, implemented base64 serialization/deserialization but waiting for more feedback from the wider team
      - looked into bridge blockage reporting: Create a detailed workflow for investigating and responding to blocked Lox bridges (#57) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
      
  This week:
    - continue prep for HACS/DRL meeting
    - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable
    - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum
    - attempt hyper upgrade again
    
  (long term things were discussed at the meeting!): Riseup Pad
    - 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 usable 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 sacrificed 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?
    
theodorsm: 2023-01-11
    Last weeks:
      - Currently in the start phase of writing my master thesis (to be finished late june 2024) in communication technology on reducing distinguishability of DTLS. The goal is to implement a validated DTLS anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS (useful for Snowflake).
    Next weeks:
      - Talk with Sean DuBois about contributing to adding anti-fingerprinting capabilities to the pion library
    Help with:
      - Find recent data set of captured DTLS traffic

--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
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My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
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Nos vamos a Croatan.

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