[tor-dev] Pluggable Transport through SOCKS proxy

[Robert Ransom]

On 2012-02-29, Arturo Filastò <hellais at torproject.org> wrote:

>   When Tor is configured to use both a Pluggable Transport proxy and SOCKS
>   proxy it should delegate the proxying to the pluggable transport proxy.
>
>   This can be achieved by setting the environment variables for the SOCKS
>   proxy to that specified inside of the torrc.
>
>   When the pluggable transport proxy starts it will first read the
> environment
>   variables and if it detects that it should be using a SOCKS proxy make
>   all it's traffic go through it. Once the pluggable transport proxy has
> successfully
>   established a connection to the SOCKS proxy it should notify Tor of it's
>   success or failure.
>   When both the SOCKS and the PluggableTransport directives are set Tor
>   should set the environemnt variable start the pluggabletransport proxy and
> wait
>   for it to report back on the SOCKS proxy status. If the pluggable
> transport
>   reports back a failure or it does not report back at all (maybe because
>   it is an outdated version), Tor should notify the user of the failure
>   and exit with an error.

That's not very nice.  At a minimum, Vidalia users will never be able
to use the GUI to recover from setting such a configuration.  (Users
can put Tor into such a configuration using the GUI, by configuring
Tor to use a proxy while a managed transport which does not support
one is specified in the torrc.)


> Specifications: Tor Pluggable Transport communication
>
>   When Tor detects a SOCKS proxy directive and a Pluggable Transport
>   proxy directive it sets the environment variable:
>
>     "TOR_PT_PROXY" -- This is the address of the proxy to be used by
>     the pluggable transport proxy. It is in the format:
>     <proxy_type>://<user_name?>:<password?>@<ip>:<port>
>     ex. socks5://tor:test1234 at 198.51.100.1:8000
>         socks4a://198.51.100.2:8001

What does Tor send if a SOCKS username or password contains ':', '@', or '\0'?

How does Tor specify an HTTP proxy?

How does Tor specify an HTTP/HTTPS proxy (i.e. an HTTP proxy which
supports the CONNECT method)?

How does Tor pass proxy settings to a managed transport after it has
started?  (If it can't, then you'll have to either (a) break all OR
connections through that transport by stopping and restarting it or
(b) remember to not use that instance of the transport again, and
launch and start using another instance of the same transport for new
OR connections with the same managed transport specified.  (a) is
easier to implement, but not nice.)


>   If the pluggable transport proxy detects that the TOR_PT_PROXY environment
>   variable is set it attempts connecting to it. On successs it will
>   write to stdout (as specified in 180-pluggable-transport.txt)
>   PROXY true. On failure it should write PROXY-ERROR <errormessage>.

What kinds of failures lead to a PROXY-ERROR response?

>
>   If Tor does not read any PROXY line or it reads a PROXY-ERROR line
>   and it is configured to use both SOCKS and PluggableTransport it should
>   exit with error.

Are managed transports not permitted to report to Tor that they have
had a non-fatal error while attempting to connect to a proxy?


Robert Ransom