[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2023-09-28

onyinyang onyinyang at torproject.org
Thu Sep 28 16:25:31 UTC 2023


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2023/tor-meeting.2023-09-28-15.57.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 05 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: meskio

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: onyinyang


== 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 ==



== Discussion ==

  - Update on snowflake domain fronting issues:
      - problem with cdn.sstatic.net affected more than just snowflake, 
also moat, conjure (no deployment change required)
      - fixed in new tor browser update but some users relying on 
snowflake/moat bridges  will be unable to update
      - relying on a the same new front may be detrimental to improve 
connection issues for some users, perhaps a pool of randomly selected 
domains would improve the situation:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/182


== 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): 2023-09-28
     Last week:
         - rdsys merge request !157
         - wrote a feature for snowflake that allows multiple domain fronts
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/182
         - wrote a forum post for the domain fronting issue with moat
             - 
https://forum.torproject.org/t/temporary-fix-for-moat-and-connection-assist/9385
         - looked into orbot use of circumvention settings api
             - https://github.com/guardianproject/orbot/issues/983
     This week:
         - finish deploying lox distributor
         - follow up on conjure reliability issues
         - visualize and write up some snowflake shadow simulation results
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2023-09-21
     Last week:
         - snowflake CDN bookkeeping 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Snowflake-costs/diff?version_id=4a6fa36c5bfc350fa01a5fe774b297f6fcddb51c
         - noticed a problem with the fastly domain front and 
coordinated with cohosh to analyze it 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2023-September/000314.html
     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: 2023-09-21
    Last week:
      - make fake descriptors for rdsys (rdsys#171)
      - document rdsys development process (rdsys#131)
      - use the right content-type in moat (rdsys#175)
      - add token authentication to onbasca requests (rdsys#174)
    Next week:
         - add a DB for bridges to rdsys (rdsys#56)

Shelikhoo: 2023-09-28
    Last Week:
         - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to 
snowflake (snowflake!64) (stalled)
         - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL
         - Remove Go 1.20 CI for Snowflake: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/184
         - Consolidated Snowflake Update 
dependencies:https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/185
         - Merge request reviews
    Next Week/TODO:
         - Write Tor Spec for Armored URL(continue)
         - Merge request reviews

onyinyang: 2023-09-28
     Last week(s):
         - Still need to merge the updated dependencies and make MR to 
upstream ZK lib:
             - found bug in the zkp crate and will push a change to this 
to the upstream branch
             - reach out to dalek-cryptography maintainers to give them 
a heads up and get a sense of the plan for zkp lib
             - we may end up maintaining the zkp lib
             - Finished changes to rdsys API at the /resources endpoint 
to meet the needs of Lox
             - Working on required changes to lox-distributor
     This week:
         - Hopefully,finish up with the dependencies issue
         - Finish up changes to Lox distributor
         - continue with metrics


     (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?


-- 
---
onyinyang

GPG Fingerprint 3CC3 F8CC E9D0 A92F A108 38EF 156A 6435 430C 2036

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