[tor-bugs] #31391 [Circumvention/Snowflake]: Block censored countries from running snowflakes

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#31391: Block censored countries from running snowflakes
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 Reporter:  cypherpunks              |          Owner:  (none)
     Type:  defect                   |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                   |      Milestone:
Component:  Circumvention/Snowflake  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                   |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                           |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                           |         Points:
 Reviewer:                           |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by cohosh):

 Replying to [comment:3 cypherpunks]:
 > I was thinking about a "can it reach torproject.org? can it reach the
 directory servers?" as a metric indicative of whether it's in a censored
 region (which would even catch the cases when a snowflake is in a non-
 censored country but a censored network), but even that approach has its
 fair share of problems.

 The snowflake proxy doesn't need to reach directory servers or
 torproject.org to work. It needs to reach the snowflake bridge(s) it knows
 about, and the snowflake broker though.

 I like this idea. Changing the snowflake logic to test a connection to the
 bridge before polling and to disable if it is unreachable would solve some
 problems before they affect the client. And the snowflake of course won't
 get any clients at all if it can't reach the broker. We could also add
 some user-facing error message to let the operator know in the case
 though.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/31391#comment:4>
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