[anti-censorship-team] future of PTs

[meskio]

Last Tuesday's conversation was very productive, a lot of people participated 
and many topics were raised. I'll try to do a summary of what was discussed 
there, please correct me if I'm wrong or I miss something I had some audio 
issues during the meeting and I miss some pieces, I'm pretty sure I will miss or 
confuse something important here.


We agreed on not putting much effort on multiprocess IPC (or an evolution of the 
current pt-spec), and focus or energies on designing the future of PTs as 
libraries integrated into arti. Having a clear API/ABI will be possible in the 
future to create an IPC if needed, as a plugin that converts the API into the 
IPC protocol, but that is something we don't plan to focus on in the near 
future.

We see a future where arti comes with "batteries included", so it has PTs and 
Connect Assist integrated and implementors using it don't need to do all the 
work of joining those pieces. There was many questions on how an API/ABI should 
look like for this. We acknowledge that in the past we've tried to be generic 
and reusable by other projects, but in reality our pt-spec hasn't being used 
much outside the Tor ecosystem. And we think it makes more sense to focus on 
what we need at Tor and not into making it reusable.

There is a big ecosystem of projects currently using PTs with Tor, we do need to 
include them into this conversation so our design doesn't miss key features that 
are needed by others.

Alex will prepare a draft proposal in a pad to start working and move this 
conversation forward.

Quoting meskio (2023-10-16 12:31:43)
> Looks like the best date for most of the people is:
> 
> Tuesday October 17 at 1500UTC (tomorrow)
> 
> Let's meet in BBB at: https://tor.meet.coop/mes-gsp-tmh-2hm
> 
> Quoting meskio (2023-10-12 12:55:12)
> > 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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 My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
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Nos vamos a Croatan.
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