[anti-censorship-team] future of PTs

[meskio]

During last week's meeting we had a conversation on the future of Pluggable 
Transports. Our current pt protocol[0] have many limitations, the two main ones 
are:
  * We have to do hacks to do things like passing arguments, and they come with 
    many problems[1]
  * There are not many SOCKS server implementations and many PTs end up needing 
    to implement their own (goptlib and proteus have done it)

We have being wondering if making a change from SOCKS to a HTTP based protocol 
is the solution we need[2].

For mobile phones we will need PTs to be implemented as libraries, and some 
projects like IPtProxy[3] have being created to work around that limitation. It 
looks like we will want anyway a future were arti has PT plugins and PTs are 
integrated in arti. We might want to extend that idea to implement all the 
connect assist workflow there, so clients that use arti don't need to implement 
all the logic themselves again and again.

With that future of PTs as plugins. Do we still need a inter-process PT 
protocol? and need to make a new version of the pt-spec[0]? Or should we ditch 
it and start working on what will that plugin API/ABI look like and how PTs will 
be integrated there?


It looks like this conversation doesn't fit well in our irc weekly meetings, 
let's have a voice meeting to discuss this. I have created a poll to see what 
date next week will work better for all of us:
https://www.systemli.org/poll/#/poll/YRRF8K19Bq/participation?encryptionKey=e1f9KPaHH6z7I6uYGNQVlegHvMGB3aHJaEufGQl7
 

[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/pt-spec.txt
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/104
[2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/130
[3] https://github.com/tladesignz/IPtProxy

-- 
meskio | https://meskio.net/
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Nos vamos a Croatan.
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