[tor-dev] tor-fw-helper redux

[David Fifield]

On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 08:41:08AM +0000, Yawning Angel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>  "You are in a maze of twisty little firmwares, all terrible".
> 
> I'm at the point where the new and improved firewall helper could use
> some additional testing by various users, though there's some issues
> with the design that still need to be resolved.  But not being one
> to keep issues inherited from the original from stopping progress...
> 
> Code: https://github.com/yawning/go-fw-helper
> Bug: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13338

This is great. Is there any reason not to call it tor-fw-helper, and
replace/deprecate the existing src/tools/tor-fw-helper?

I'm thinking that as a conservative step, we should first deploy using a
static external port for flash proxy. An ephemeral port is better for
scanning resistance, but there is also the risk of poking long-lasting
holes in firewalls and overflowing port forwarding tables in these
shoddy routers.

We need at least to add a loop to where flashproxy-client calls the port
forwarding helper. Ideally we would also try to remove the mapping
before exiting. We could do it in the first SIGINT handler--though we
know that SIGINT handling doesn't work on Windows because tor
immediately zaps you with TerminateProcess. We could do something like
we do with terminateprocess-buffer and meek-client-torbrowser, and add
an --exit-on-stdin-eof option to flashproxy-client so that it can detect
when it is supposed to shut down gracefully. I'm not sure it's worth it
though, especially if unmapping ports is unreliable.

We'll need a tor-browser-bundle branch that builds go-fw-helper and adds
it to the ClientTransportPlugin line. I'll look at adding the
flashproxy-client loop.

>  * The UPnP mapping description is hard coded to "Tor relay" to match
>    tor-fw-helper.

Is there any way to omit it or leave it blank? I thought there was a
ticket somewhere about "Tor relay" making Tor use more conspicuous, but
I can't find it now.

David Fifield