[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-01-12

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu Jan 12 17:36:22 UTC 2023


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-01-12-15.58.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
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PUBLIC PAD
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Anti-censorship team meeting pad
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Next meeting: Thursday, January 19 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 check-in about the status of anti-censorship work at Tor.
Coordinate collaboration between people/teams on anti-censorship at the 
Tor Project and Tor community.

== Links to Useful documents ==

     * Our anti-censorship roadmap:
         * Roadmap: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/boards
     * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/home
     * Past meeting notes can be found at:
         * https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/
     * Tickets that need reviews:  from sponsors, we are working on:
         * All needs review tickets:
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&assignee_id=None
         * Sponsor 28
             * must-do tickets: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/10
             * possible tickets: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name%5b%5d=Sponsor%2028&milestone_title=None
         * Sponsor 96
             * https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
         * Sponsor 139 <-- hackerncoder, irl, joydeep, meskio, emmapeel 
working on it
             * https://pad.riseup.net/p/sponsor139-meeting-pad

== Announcements ==

     * Open Collective funding for Snowflake bridge operations is open
         * 
https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-daily-operations
         * First update post: 
https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-daily-operations/updates/2022-year-in-review

== Discussion ==

     * Enable snowflake-02 in Orbot
         * snowflake-02 (enabled in Tor Browser only) currently gets 
only about 5% the traffic of snowflake-01
             * at this moment:
                 * snowflake-01: 445 MiB/s
                 * snowflake-02:  21 MiB/s
         * snowflake-01 reaching its CPU limit
         * discuss with topic with guardian project at next S96 meeting
     * deofuscation obfs4 issues are public
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfs4/-/issues/40007
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/91
     * is the stun.stunprotocol.org situation resolved to everyone's 
satisfaction, or is more attention required?
         * 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2022-December/000271.html
         * removed from default lists 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40241
         * it is resolved
     * (From last week) arti-based obfs4 quick reachability monitor 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/717#note_2866528
         * feel free to comment on it
     * snowflake blocking in Russia (maybe TSPU only) by Hello Verify 
Request (since about 2022-07-20)
         * 
https://ntc.party/t/second-snowflake-bridge-available-for-testing/3445/7
         * 
https://ntc.party/t/in-case-snowflake-rendezvous-gets-blocked/1857/9
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40030#note_2823140
         * 
https://explorer.ooni.org/chart/circumvention?since=2022-07-08&until=2022-08-14&probe_cc=CA%2CCN%2CIR%2CRU
             * Side note: see how correlated the number of daily reports 
is between CA and RU. Originally dcf included CA on this graph to 
highlight a potential problem in the OONI torsf test, since Snowflake 
should not be blocked in Canada. But a more likely explanation may be 
geolocation errors; i.e., that IPs in Russia are being mistakenly 
attributed to Canada, and therefore Canda shows an unexpectedly high 
rate of anomalies. We suspect something similar happened with IR->US in 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40207#note_2844116.
         * shelikhoo will look into it

== Actions ==

     *

== Interesting links ==


== 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 2022-01-12 (away this week)
Last week:
     - updated default STUN servers in the proxy and client
         - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40241
     - submitted MR for conjure on desktop TB
         - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/merge_requests/618
     - worked on debugging domian fronting issues with conjure
         - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/41023
     - wrote up an analysis of BridgeDB anti-enumeration methods
         - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/84
This week:
     - continue work on conjure client
     - more work on lox integration
Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-01-12
     Last week:
         - snowflake CDN bookkeeping 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-costs/diff?version_id=ac45648bdc6be923731b40251142ac6fe427d4dd
         - experimented with increasing conntrack limits on snowflake-01 
and documented how to do it in the installation guide 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40239
         - reviewed merge request to abbreviate stun server 
specifications 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/127
         - made a public repo with code to generate snowflake graphs 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dcf/snowflake-graphs, used for the graph 
at 
https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-daily-operations/updates/2022-year-in-review
         - restarted snowflake-01 with 4 KCP state machines 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40246
         - made a public repo for obfs4 remote testing scripts 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/dcf/obfs4-checks and made a graph of obfs4 
bridge upgrade progress 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/obfs4/-/issues/40008#note_2867626
     Next week:
         - migrate goptlib to gitlab 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/86#note_2823122
         - try Conjure PT development version 
https://forum.torproject.net/t/tor-dev-introducing-a-conjure-pt-for-tor/4429
     Help with:

meskio: 2023-01-12
    Last week:
        - publish obfs4 deobfuscation bugs
        - start working on localization support for rdsys (rdsys#11)
        - review dummy whatsapp bot (rdsys!66)
        - add microsoft edge installation to snowflake website 
(snowflake-webext!62)
    Next week/after holidays:
        - add localization support to rdsys (rdsys#11)
        - support bridgescanner (rdsys#143)

Shelikhoo: 2023-01-12
    Last Week:
         - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to 
snowflake (snowflake!64)
         - [Discussion & Deployment] Rollout of Distributed Snowflake 
Support
         - [Coding & Deployment] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result 
Collector (anti-censorship/team#54)
         - [Research] HTTPT Planning 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/httpt/-/issues/1
      - [Merge Request Done] Update to support chunked upload of probe 
log(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/logcollector-admin/-/merge_requests/2)
      - [Merge Request Done] Add Resumable Upload to Log Collector 
(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/logcollector/-/merge_requests/3)
      - [Merge Request Done] cumulative updates on providing more 
options: loopback traffic collection, raw log collection, remove obfs4 
bridge line input for snowflake 
(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/probeobserver/-/merge_requests/1)
    Next Week:
         - [Research] WebTunnel planning (Continue)
         - Fixing the vantage point in Russia
         - push the chunked upload raw data upload change to vantage points


Itchy Onion: 2022-1-12
     Last week:
         - worked on RACE performance issue

     This week:
       - Made progress on the RACE performance improvement -- the plugin 
now is able to reuse snowflake connections to send multiple messages 
between the same hosts. I'm not entirely convinced the improvements are 
substantial yet. Will run some tests and see if it can be further improved


hackerncoder: 2022-01-12
     last week:
         - figure out what makes ooni-exporter put all reports from a 
country in either success or failure (I still don't know why. But I got 
it to work)
     Next week:
         - getting ooni-exporter to work with torsf (snowflake)
         - work on monitoring bridges health

cece: 2022-12-22
     This week:
         - working on creating a dummy WhatsApp bot
     Next week:
         - My bot is not yet working as expected s still trying to 
figure that out
     Help with:
          - resources

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