[tor-bugs] #30872 [Circumvention/Censorship analysis]: Test BridgeDB's distribution channels in controlled experiment
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki
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Wed Jun 12 21:18:32 UTC 2019
#30872: Test BridgeDB's distribution channels in controlled experiment
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Reporter: phw | Owner: dcf
Type: project | Status: new
Priority: Medium | Milestone:
Component: Circumvention/Censorship analysis | Version:
Severity: Normal | Keywords: gfw
Actual Points: | Parent ID:
Points: 3 | Reviewer:
Sponsor: Sponsor30-can |
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As of June 2019, BridgeDB distributes bridges over HTTPS, email, and moat.
We should find out which ones of these three distribution channels censors
can break by injecting test bridges into all of them, and monitoring for
how long these bridges continue to be reachable. For now, we should focus
on China.
1. Set up at least three bridges; one for each of our three distribution
channels. The bridges can use the `BridgeDistribution` tor option to tell
BridgeDB how they choose to be distributed.
2. We may also want to disable the bridges' ORPort and use
`AssumeReachable` to rule out the possibility that the censor found the
bridge by discovering its ORPort somehow.
3. Have a client in China continuously test these bridges at random times,
so we can learn when (and if) they stop being reachable.
4. Wait and keep an eye on the country code of clients who use these
bridges. We shouldn't be collecting any more data because the bridges will
be used by real users.
We probably want more than one bridge per distribution channel. For
example, if our HTTPS bridge becomes blocked, we don't know for sure that
the GFW is able to enumerate a large fraction of the HTTPS pool.
Theoretically, a GFW engineer could have gotten the bridge after a single
request to bridges.torproject.org. The more bridges we have, the more
confident can we be in our results.
Also, we should understand how BridgeDB maintains its sub-hashrings per
distribution channel.
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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30872>
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