[tor-project] Initial roadmap for the anti-censorship team

[Tom Ritter]

Does (4) encompass understanding what it is that adversaries key off
of to block Tor?  (e.g. is it IP address, IP+Port, fixed byte
strings.... If it is IP, how frequently is it updated, etc)

-tom
On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 at 06:34, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> Here is an early brainstorming list of the scope for our future
> anti-censorship team. Let us know if we left out a critical category.
> And of course once we have actual team members I expect they will take
> this initial roadmap and do something even smarter than this list. :)
>
> (1) BridgeDB:
> - Automated monitoring
> - Understand current usage patterns, consider improving the design
>     Don't get obfs4 bridges blocked by other transports (#28655)
>
> (2) Pluggable Transports:
> - Improve the PT interface with Tor, to pass logs etc (#25502)
>     [with network team]
> - Tor Browser can use other circumvention tools as proxies (#28556)
>     [with browser team]
> - Specific PTs:
>     Maintain obfs4proxy (like fixing the iat bug that let Kazakhstan block it)
>     Snowflake
>     Httpsproxy
>     Marionette
>     Domain front through community sites
> - Talk to research groups to keep in touch about their PT research work
>
> (3) Improve Tor user experience for users in censored / crappy networks:
> - Gettor: automated monitoring and automated updates. Improve UX.
> - Understanding and reducing client time to bootstrap [with network team]
>     and other parameters that are tuned poorly for slow networks
>
> (4) Understand Tor censorship:
> - Tor Browser network testing mode (#23839, #28531) [with browser team]
> - Reachability scanning for the default (shipped in Tor Browser) bridges
>     [with ooni]
> - Understand bridge load and bridge blocking (e.g. fix user counting bugs
>     that are making our Turkey count wrong) [with network / metrics teams]
>
> (5) Help users use bridges:
> - Help NGOs get their users on bridges (#28015, #28526)
> - Tor Browser *automates* picking the right PTs [with browser team]
>
> (6) Community outreach and integration: [with community team]
> - [Initial list of outreach partner NGOs elided for now, since some of
>    them have opsec needs to keep their people safe]
>
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