[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2025-10-30

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship

···

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Next meeting: Thursday, November 6 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:Issue Boards · Issues by Assignee · 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 ==

  *

== Actions ==

  * Remove webtunnel setuid script in 1 weeks.(decrease this by one every week)

== 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): 2025-10-30
  Last week:
      - responded to Abhishek about multipath routing to Tor bridge research
      - discussed Shadow simulations with UCSC students researching enumeration attacks
      - updated snowflake proxy README (snowflake#40290)
      - wrote a proxy churn patch for the snowflake broker (snowflake#40494)
      - commented on webtunnel sni-spoofing interface
  Next week:
      - research snowflake enumeration attacks (snowflake#40396)
      - follow up on snowflake rendezvous failures (snowflake#40447)
      - revisit conjure integration with lyrebird
      - take a look at potential snowflake orbot bug
          - [BUG] 20% CPU overhead in kindness mode · Issue #1183 · guardianproject/orbot-android · GitHub
  
dcf: 2025-10-30
  Last week:
    - made snowflake-graphs use SQLite as intermediate data representation rather than CSV Use SQLite rather than CSV for intermediate data representation (!3) · Merge requests · David Fifield / snowflake-graphs · GitLab
    - fixed a bug with snowflake-graphs undercounting coverage for certain rarely occurring levels of factors Underestimates coverage for certain rarely occurring values (#3) · Issues · David Fifield / snowflake-graphs · GitLab
    - opened an issue for coverage=2.00 in snowflake-stats descriptors during a time when 2 brokers were running simultaneously Decide what to do with the 2 concurrent broker instances in November 2024 (#5) · Issues · David Fifield / snowflake-graphs · GitLab
  Next week:
    - 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
Help with:

meskio: 2024-10-30
    Last week:
        - SOTO recording
        - grant planning
        - multi-front support in meek (lyrebird#40027)
    Next week:
        - AFK

Shelikhoo: 2024-10-23
    Last Week:
         - [Testing] 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 ) testing environment setup/research
        - SOTO slide
        - merge request reviews
    Next (working) Week/TODO:
        - Merge request reviews
        - [Deployment]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 ) Building custom Tor Browser with patch applied
        - SOTO recordingh

onyinyang: 2025-10-30
  Last week(s):
    - Troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China
      - updating the fronts led to different connection issues, looking into these in more detail
      - differing results connecting to conjure locally vs. from vantage point
      - investigating issues with the conjure authors/maintainers
    - Monitoring email profiler for rdsys #129
    - Monitoring rdsys #rdsys #249
    - Presented at York University
    - Prepared (and submitting today) talk proposal for Splintercon
    - Outside of Tor: submitted MR to change Lox to rely on lox-extensions rather than lox-library (this is an updated anonymous credential implementation but functionality is the same)
    
Next week:
    - Continue troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China
    - Finish up debugging rdsys#129 and rdsys#249 hopefully (take 3? 4?)
    - Continue looking into bridgestrap#47
      Switch back to some of these:
          As time allows:
              - Lox still seems to be filling up the disk on the rdsys-test server despite changes made to delete old entries, look into what's going wrong
               Blog post for conjure: Set up a more permanent Conjure bridge (#46) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / conjure · GitLab
              - review Tor browser Lox integration Bug 43096: Move to Rust for the Lox integration (!1300) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Applications / Tor Browser · GitLab
              - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:
    Enable repeat responses to successful Lox requests (!305) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / lox · GitLab

    - Work on outstanding milestone issues:
      - 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: 2025-06-12
    Last weeks:
      - Applying for funding from NLnet to implement DTLS 1.3 in Pion. Got through the first round.
      - Writing paper for FOCI: continuation of master thesis about reducing distinguishability of DTLS in Snowflake by implementing covert-dtls, further analysis of collected browser fingerprint and stability test of covert-dtls in snowflake proxies. Draft: https://theodorsm.net/FOCI25
      - Key takeaways:
        * covert-dtls is stable when mimicking DTLS 1.2 handshakes, while the randomization approach— though more resistant to fingerprinting — tends to be less stable.
        * Chrome webextensions are more unstable than standalone proxies
        * covert-dtls should be integrated in Snowflake proxies as they produce the ClientHello messages during the DTLS handshake.
        * Chrome randomizes the order of extension list.
        * Firefox uses DTLS 1.3 by default in WebRTC.
        * A prompt adoption of DTLS 1.3 in both Snowflake and our fingerprint-resistant library is needed to keep up with browsers
        * The evolution of browsers’ fingerprints had no noticeable effect on Snowflake’s number of daily users over the last year.
        * Even with a sharp drop in the amount of proxies, it does not seem to affect the number of Snowflake users.
        * Browser extensions make Snowflake resistant to ClientHello fingerprinting.
        * Standalone proxies can serve more Snowflake clients per volunteer than webextensions.
        * We need metrics on which types of proxies are actually being matched and successfully used by clients.
    Next weeks:
      - Getting paper camera ready.
      - Fix merge conflicts in MR (Add covert-dtls to proxy and client (!448) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab).
    Help with:
      - Should we do user testing of covert-dtls?
      
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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