[tor-project] Anti-censorship meeting notes, 2021 August 12

Thu Aug 12 21:42:29 UTC 2021

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2021/tor-meeting.2021-08-12-16.00.html

and our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday August 12th 16:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

== Goal of this meeting ==

Weekly checkin about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at Tor.

== Announcements ==

    Job opening on the anti-censorship team:
https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs/software-developer-anticensorship-2/
\o/

== Discussion ==

    v3 of the webext manifest doesn't support creating peerconnections
in the background

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/merge_requests/21

    https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-extensions/issues/77

    we will present our need to
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1207214 to
encourage them to permit WebRTC in service workers

    Testing Tor in TM:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/support/-/issues/40030

    relay users dropped off in the latter half of July 2021

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-05-14&end=2021-08-12&country=tm&events=off

    ggus found a volunteer to help with testing. obfs4, meek-azure, and
snowflake did not work; a private obfs4 bridge worked.

    http://emma.mhgb.net/ was not reachable, so ggus set up a mirror at
http://emma.gus.computer/

    hackerncoder is combining all the gettor scripts

    while doing so, it will be helpful to also start using 1 archive.org
item or collection per release
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/32#note_2738854

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

    USENIX Security 2021 papers
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/technical-sessions

    "Domain Shadowing: Leveraging Content Delivery Networks for Robust
Blocking-Resistant Communications"
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/wei

    "How Great is the Great Firewall? Measuring China's DNS Censorship"
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/hoang

    "Balboa: Bobbing and Weaving around Network Censorship"
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/rosen

    "Weaponizing Middleboxes for TCP Reflected Amplification"
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/bock

    "Defeating DNN-Based Traffic Analysis Systems in Real-Time With
Blind Adversarial Perturbations"
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/nasr

== Reading group ==

    We will discuss "" on

    Questions to ask and goals to have:

    What aspects of the paper are questionable?

    Are there immediate actions we can take based on this work?

    Are there long-term actions we can take based on this work?

    Is there future work that we want to call out, in hopes that others
will pick it up?

== Updates ==

Name:
    This week:
        - What you worked on this week.
    Next week:
        - What you are planning to work on next week.
    Help with:

         - Something you need help with.

cecylia (cohosh): last updated 2021-08-12
Last week:
    - hiring tasks
    - fix issue with bridgestrap metrics (bridgestrap#20)
    - visualized the result of our snowflake and obfs4 probe tests
    - s28 meetings and deliverables
    - discussions with OONI about OONI tor tests:
        - https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1730
    - reviewed snowflake!52
    - reviewed snowflake-webext!21
    - debugged issue with snowflake#25595
    - fixed bridgestrap restart by moving from cron to systemd timers
    - worked on BridgeDB X-Forwarded-For parsing for Moat (bridgedb#40027)
    - deployed snowflake#48
This week:
    - more hiring and s28 meetings
    - help the browser team with tor's autoconnect feature
    - reviews
        - rdsys!11
    - follow up on OONI tor tests
    - bridgedb web page overhaul (bridgedb#34322)
Needs help with:

arlolra: 2021-08-12

    Last week:

    - Migrate to v3 of the webextension manifest

    Next week:

    - Maybe get back to snowflake-webext #10

    - Write up the pitch for our use case for supporting creating
PeerConnections in background service workers
https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-extensions/issues/77

    Help with:

    -

dcf: 2021-08-12

    Last week:

    - approved snowflake buffer size increase
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/48

    - merged Snowflake AMP cache feature following review
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/50

    Next week:

    Help with:

maxb: 2021-07-15

    Last week:

    - Opened
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40054
re: utls for broker negotiation

    - Worked on github.com/max-b/nat-testing for
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/25595

    - Added a snowflake-proxy-no-nat and a snowflake-client-no-nat to
help with debugging

    - Successfully making connections from snowflake-client and
snoflake-client-no-nat through the snowflake-proxy-no-nat, but not
having any success with the snowflake-proxy (with nat).

    - Added a local dockerized STUN server

    Next week:

    - Use wireshark to figure out the difference between successful
snowflake-proxy-no-nat and unsuccessful snowflake-proxy-nat

    - Work on implementing different NAT types, particularly in a way
that's conducive to automatic testing

    - Add testing wrapper w/ "pass/fail" conditions

meskio: 2021-07-22

    Last week:

    - submit the "final" gettor rdsys integration (rdsys!11 rdsys#32)

    - report number of clients on the snowflake webextension
(snowflake-webext!19)

    - Wait pollInterval in snowflake between proxy offers
(snowflake#40055 snowflake!51)

    - link anti-censorship doc from the TPA wiki (team#4)

    - review snowflake README clean ups (snowflake!49)

    - looking up at issues with bridgestrap tests and CollecTor
(bridgestrap#20)

    - fixes in mutex usage in bridgestrap collector metrics (bridgestrap!10)

    Next week:

    - AFK for the next 3 weeks

    Help with:

    -