[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-10-12

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu Oct 12 16:35:03 UTC 2023


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-10-12-15.59.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad
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THIS IS A PUBLIC PAD
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Anti-censorship
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Next meeting: Thursday, Oct 19 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: onyinyang

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

This week's Facilitator: shelikhoo


== 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 96 <-- meskio, shell, onyinyang, cohosh
                         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/milestones/24
                 * Sponsor 150 <-- meskio working on it
                         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=Sponsor%20150



== Announcements ==

     * A poll to set a date for a 'Future of PTs' voice conversation
         * 
https://www.systemli.org/poll/#/poll/YRRF8K19Bq/evaluation?encryptionKey=e1f9KPaHH6z7I6uYGNQVlegHvMGB3aHJaEufGQl7
         * Times in UTC

== Discussion ==

     * (Network Health) 'Running' flag for counting bridges and network 
size https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/team/-/issues/318
         * metrics are going to start using bridgestrap instead of the 
running flag to know if bridge is working
         * we need bridgestrap to publish results every hour
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/bridgestrap/-/issues/39

(Oct 12)
     * Armored Bridge line Spec
  https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126#note_2954127
         * the spec is ready to review
         * we'll discuss it next week

     * snowflake broker restart(deployment) needed, and deletion of 
ip-count-mask key
  https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40295
         * shelikhoo will tag a snowflake version and deploy 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): 2023-10-12
     Last week:
         - followed up on performing Snowflake tests in OONI without Tor
             - 
https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/1686#issuecomment-1753563763
         - started some larger-scale shadow experiments
         - various MR reviews
     This week:
         - deploy lox distributor (waiting on TPA)
         - follow up on conjure reliability issues
         - visualize and write up some snowflake shadow simulation results
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-10-12
     Last week:
         - continued to document changes in snowflake bridge usage after 
the fastly domain front issue - snowflake-02 mysteriously and suddenly 
returned to former bandwidth levels (not yet former user levels) on 
2023-10-04.
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2023-October/000320.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/attachments/20231009/b6c68dd3/attachment-0002.png
         - investigated and reported a pluggable transports user 
counting bug that exists since tor 0.4.8.4.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/website/-/issues/40102
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40871
         - did client-side experiments to compare the availability of 
proxies for snowflake-01 and snowflake-02 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2023-October/000321.html
         - opened an issue to update documentation (bridge line args 
versus command line options) in snowflake client README 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40294
         - opened an issue to restart the broker after disabling proxy 
churn metrics 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40295
     Next week:
         - revise encapsulation.ReadData redesign to return an error in 
the case of a short buffer 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/154
         - open issue to have snowflake-client log whenever KCPInErrors 
is nonzero 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40262#note_2886018
             - parent: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40267
         - open issue to disable /debug endpoint on snowflake broker
     Before EOY 2023:
         - move snowflake-02 to new VM
     Help with:

meskio: 2023-10-12
    Last week:
        - review sponsor 30 audit issues to be ready to publish
        - review webtunnel bridgeline args fixes (webtunnel!19)
        - mostly AFK
    Next week:
        - test the whatsapp bot (rdsys#147)

Shelikhoo: 2023-10-12
    Last Week:
           - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support 
to snowflake (snowflake!64) (continue)
                 - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL(continue) 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/126#note_2954127
                 - Refine argument error processing in WebTunnel server 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webtunnel/-/merge_requests/19
                 - Renovate is Using Unexpected Golang Version During 
Dependency Update 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/renovate-cron/-/issues/9
    Next Week/TODO:
           - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL (continue)
           - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support 
to snowflake (snowflake!64) (continue): proceed to rebase
           - Merge request reviews

onyinyang: 2023-10-12
         Last week(s):
                 - Made MRs to upstream zkp libs:
                         - fixed bug(? hopefully this can be reviewed) 
in the zkp crate
                          - made MRs to both dalek-cryptography and 
zkcrypto and will maintain lox-zkp
         This week:
                 - Continue with metrics
                 - Add functionality for a MAX_DAILY_BRIDGES (the number 
of bridges that can be distributed each day)
                 - Start work on telegram distributor bot for Lox

         (long term things were discussed at the meeting!):
https://pad.riseup.net/p/tor-ac-community-azaleas-room-keep
                         - brainstorming grouping strategies for Lox 
buckets (of bridges) and gathering context on how types of bridges are 
distributed/use in practice
                         Question: What makes a bridge usable for a 
given user, and how can we encode that to best ensure we're getting the 
most appropriate resources to people?
                                 1. Are there some obvious grouping 
strategies that we can already consider?
                                  e.g., by PT, by bandwidth (lower 
bandwidth bridges sacrificed to open-invitation buckets?), by locale (to 
be matched with a requesting user's geoip or something?)
                                 2. Does it make sense to group 3 
bridges/bucket, so trusted users have access to 3 bridges (and untrusted 
users have access to 1)? More? Less?


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