Hey everyone!
Here are our meeting logs:
And our meeting pad:
Anti-censorship work meeting pad
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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, February 12 16:00 UTC
Facilitator:meskio
^^^(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: shelikhoo
== 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 ==
\* call to relay operators to run snowflake proxies
\* https://pad.riseup.net/p/4dOwW-5eaAkMfFFoHlEM-snowflake-call-keep
\* 1\. Direct link for snowflake webextension option \(Done\)
\* 2\. Sort options based on utility value
\* whitelisting in russia
\* https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40071
\* let's check if dns transports work, as we are already looking into them for Iran
\* champa \(Google AMP cache\) might be a useful PT in Iran, as google tends to be allowlisted
\* but there is a rate limit per client on 10KB/s and after a while it stops working for hours
== Actions ==
\*
== Interesting links ==
* Cf. [Iran] unrest 2025-2026 (#40068) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / censorship-analysis · GitLab
== Reading group ==
\* We will discuss "Fingerprint\-resistant DTLS for usage in Snowflake" on Feb 5
\* https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/2025/foci-2025-0006.php
\* 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?
\* Explore why DTLS handshakes fails\. Even a \~12% failure rate with baseline standalone proxy\.
\* Add metrics on which types of proxies are actually being matched and successfully used by clients\. Might also be useful for against DDoS and malicous proxies\.
\* Is there future work that we want to call out in hopes that others will pick it up?
\* Next in the Reading Group Queue:
\*
== 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): 2026-02-05
Last week:
- SQS costs accounting
- snowflake simulations for enumeration defence proposal
- answered questions from new proxy operators
Next week:
- research snowflake enumeration attacks (snowflake#40396)
- implement proxy fairness proposal
- 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: 2026-02-05
Last week:
- commented on some bootstrapping reports from Iran [Iran] unrest 2025-2026 (#40068) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / censorship-analysis · 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: 2026-02-05
Last week:
- reload the certificate in moat-shim (team#172)
- check why are we running out of space in rdsys-frontend-01 (tap/team#42484)
- keep up with iran internet changes (censorship-analysis#40068)
- brainstorm on russia whitelist situation (censorship-analysis#40071)
- investigate why there is webtunnel bridges in the email distributor (rdsys#174)
Next week:
- investigate why there is webtunnel bridges in the email distributor (rdsys#174)
Shelikhoo: 2026-02-05
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
- Merge request Reviews
- Vantage point maintaince
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
- MR Review
- Design experment for internet shutdown
- Vantage point maintaince
onyinyang: 2026-01-29
Last week(s):
-Making it harder to inject a bridge to a specific client https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/257#note_3322645
- Use root key for rdsys to derive keys for each of the distributors
\- Working on https distributor language selector https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/196
\- fixing some errors in the translated pages
\- does the translation work for bridges\.torproject\.org exist somewhere already?
Next week:
- Continue work on rdsys#257 and rdsys#196
- Continue Investigating rdsys#248 i.e., why dysfunctional webtunnel bridges are being distributed
- Troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China
- waiting for more information from conjure authors/maintainers
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: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conjure/-/issues/46
\- review Tor browser Lox integration https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1300
\- add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:
\- Work on outstanding milestone issues:
\- key rotation automation
Later:
pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind of FFI? https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096):
\- add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
\- add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:
- 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: 2026-02-05
Last weeks:
- Working on implementing review comments on MR: Add covert-dtls to proxy and client (!644) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
- Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion
Next weeks:
- Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion
Help with:
-
Facilitator Queue:
onyinyang shelikhoo meskio cohosh
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