[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-10-24

meskio · October 24, 2024, 4:40pm

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-10-24-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

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Next meeting: Thursday, October 31 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: onyinyang
^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

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 projects, we are working on:
    * All needs review tickets:
      * Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
    * Project 158 <-- meskio working on it
      * Issues · Anti-censorship · GitLab

== Announcements ==

*

== Discussion ==

* Snowflake broker transition still pending.

  * Adding a snowflake transport to lyrebird
    * Draft: Add snowflake transport to Lyrebird (!63) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / lyrebird · GitLab
    * Squash PTs into Lyrebird: Squash PTs into Lyrebrid (#40015) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / lyrebird · GitLab
    * TODOs: add proxy support and event logging
    * We decide is a good idea to integrate the snowflake client into lyrebird
    * we are not removing the snowflake client from the snowflake proyect for now, we'll keep both until it becomes a burden.
    * only the snowflake client will be integrated in lyrebird, not the server

  * pion/webrtc v4 release is out
    * it has support to integrate with covert-dtls
    * on the beta testing there were some issues, we'll need to check if it works with the release or it needs work

  * split broker into components
    * there is an old MR with a WIP version of this change
    * we are still interested on it
    * cohosh will check with arlo if he can continue that work or we'll close it for now

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

  * OS image with remote access (for providing vantages in censored regions), with built-in circumvention as an incentive to run it.
    * GitHub - ValdikSS/hoogmoon-testing: HOOGMOON — Remote Access OS for Internet Censorship Research
    * Ищутся волонтёры: проект по мониторингу сети - Russia - NTC
  * Tor 0.4.8.13 was released with STATUS TYPE=version support so PTs can report their version
    * https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/raw/release-0.4.8/ReleaseNotes
  * GitHub - refraction-networking/uquic: Low-level access to the QUIC Initial Packet for mimicry purposes, hard fork of quic-go.
    * "Low-level access to the QUIC Initial Packet for mimicry purposes, hard fork of quic-go."

== 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): 2024-10-24
  Last week:
      - finished IPtProxy rewrite
          - Refactor IPtProxy to remove dependency on patch files by cohosh · Pull Request #61 · tladesignz/IPtProxy · GitHub
      - added a snowflake transport into lyrebird
  Draft: Add snowflake transport to Lyrebird (!63) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / lyrebird · GitLab
      - added OnClientConnected callback to the snowflake proxy
  Add a ClientConnected callback in the snowflake proxy library (#40402) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - fixed a panic when SnowflakeConn is closed more than once
  Calling Close() twice on a SnowflakeConn causes a panic (#40405) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      - merged some dependency updates
      - lots of reviews
  This week:
      - continue work on adding a snowflake transport to lyrebird
      - finish snowflake dependency upgrades that were causing problems
      - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best practices
      - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table
          - Simplify BridgeLine struct and make it variable length (!147) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
  Needs help with:
      - abandoned snowflake MR
          - Draft: Split broker into components (!39) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab

meskio: 2024-10-24
    Last week:
        - bring back QR coes for email bridges (rdsys#244)
        - add QR codes to Telegram distributor (rdsys#243)
        - debug gettor telegram issues (onionsproutsbot#63)
    Next week:
        - update snowflake proxy debian package

Shelikhoo: 2024-10-24
Last Week:
- [Next Action Pending] snowflake broker update/reinstall(cont.):

         - [Awaiting Review] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab ) improvements
         - [Awaiting Input] Review CI: fix `latest` container image tag. CI: fix `latest` container image tag. (!408) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
         - Update vantage point image on cnnext, russia
         - Prepare State of the Onion script/slide
            - Merge request reviews
    Next Week/TODO:
        - Merge request reviews
         - Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.) ( Draft: Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (!315) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab ) improvements
         - Prepare State of the Onion script/slide
         - Work on finishing snowflake container release(and fix the comments)
         - Work on Parpare DeploymentTool for Publishing Parpare DeploymentTool for Publishing (#9) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Connectivity Measurement / logcollector-admin · GitLab

onyinyang: 2024-10-24
  Last week(s):
    - MR for troll-patrol integration for Lox bridge blockage detection
      - Add Troll Patrol to Lox (!263) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
  Next week:
    - fix up some troll-patrol functionality
      - extra-info collecting/parsing should work correctly and exit gracefully
      - maybe make blockage detection in extra info a bit more reasonable
        - prevent evaluation before stats are published
    - implement and deploy test distributor
    - update lox protocols to return duplicate responses for an already seen request
    - Work on outstanding milestone issues:
      in particular: Increase the acceptable time for bridgeline failure (#69) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab
      - key rotation automation

    Later:
    pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? Consider dropping Lox's WASM (#43096) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab):
      - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
      - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:
      Lox module doesn't include trusted invitation redemption (#42974) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
    - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is working/valuable
    - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum

  (long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
    - 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: 2024-10-24
    Last weeks:
      - Adjusting to post-student life
      - Testing out beta releases of pion dtls and webrtc
    Next weeks:
      - Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases
      - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls
      - Condensing thesis into paper
    Help with:
      - Feedback on thesis

Facilitator Queue:
     onyinyang shelikhoo meskio
1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the facilitator for the meeting
2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the tail of the queue

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