[tor-dev] Censorship Simulator Virtual Machine GSoC

[Arturo Filastò]

Hi Johannes,

I wanted to introduce you and your GSoC project to the list.

The project is about building a virtual machine based censorship simulator. The goal is to have a way to test if the ooniprobe tests are working properly by simulating the network of a censor.

Our goal is to actually run the software that a censor would be running (e.x. squid, bluecoat proxy sg va, etc.) and detect it's presence in an as real as possible environment.

Johannes and Klaudiu analyzed a bit of the possible technological solutions to making this here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/CensorshipSimulator.

I think that the outcome is that we will be using Vagrant, meaning that this simulator could then be run on OSX, Linux and Windows.

The kind of networks we will be creating are those where:

* There is a transparent HTTP proxy
* There is NAT
* Certain sites are blocked thanks to HTTP headers
* RST packets are sent when connecting to certain hosts
* DNS based censorship is present

If you have some ideas of things you would like to see in this, add ideas to this ticket: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7233, or create a page in the trac wiki nested under https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/CensorshipSimulator.

~ Art.