[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-08-22

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu Aug 22 17:21:50 UTC 2024


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-08-22-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday, August 29 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: meskio
^^^(See Facilitator Queue at tail)

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 projects, 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
         * Project 158 <-- meskio working on it
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=Project%20158


== Announcements ==

     *

== Discussion ==

- Snowflake debian package is outdated:
     - Is there a plan for updates? If AC-Team wants to increase the 
number of snowflake standalone proxies, we need to maintain deb 
packages. Should we start a call for maintainers? If so, what are the 
requirements?
     - MR: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/community/-/merge_requests/386/diffs 
Please note that every new string added to the community portal is 
localized. If this is a temporary issue, I don't think it worth merging 
it. (gus)
     - we do plan to update it but it will take some months, there will 
be work as part of P146

     * https://github.com/eyedeekay/blizzard/ "Blizzard: The I2P 
Snowflake donor Plugin"
         * should we ask them to use a diferent identifier than 
"standalone" to find them in the stats?
         * meskio will open an issue on their side to ask them to use a 
different name
             * https://github.com/eyedeekay/blizzard/issues/5

     * meskio has archived 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-mobile
         * hasn't being updated in 3 years
         * no complains for now

     * PT binary size updates
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42607
         * Remove conjure from android as a last resort

     * Manifest V3 Deployment pending, will proceed on next week

== Actions ==


== Interesting links ==


== Reading group ==
     * We will discuss "Bridging Barriers: A Survey of Challenges and 
Priorities in the Censorship Circumvention Landscape" on Aug 22, 2024
         * PDF at 
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/xue-bridging
         * 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): 2024-08-22
     Last week:
         - worked with applications team on reducing PT binary size
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40362
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/merge_requests/1020
         - lots of reviews and gitlab todo items
         - ttp grant writing for conjure work
     This week:
         - finish backlog of reviews and todo items
         - take a look at snowflake web and webext translations and best 
practices
         - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-08-22
     Last week:
         - presented Snowflake research at USENIX Security 2024 
https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity24/presentation/bocovich 
https://www.bamsoftware.com/talks/snowflake-usenix2024/
         - commented on exposing pollInterval in snowflake proxy API 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/359
         - linked past "anti-fraud" issue to recent GFWeb research 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/censorship-analysis/-/issues/40026#note_3062215
         - commented on adjusting copy buffer size in snowflake proxy 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/361#note_3062218
         - sent email to authors to try and resolve obfs4/lyrebird 
naming confusion 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2024-August/000351.html
     Next week:
         - 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
         - move snowflake-02 to new VM
Help with:
         - tell me when to restart the brokers for 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40349

meskio: 2023-08-22
     Last week:
         - deploy email distributors in rdsys in parallel with BridgeDB 
(rdsys#187)
         - test our new deployments
         - test ipv6 and webtunnel fake descriptors in rdsys-test 
(rdsys!365)
         - restart onionsprouts bot and investigate why it was not 
working (onionsproutsbot#62)
         - archive snowflake-mobile repo (snowflake-mobile#23)
         - investigate why gettor is not updating github and gitlab 
(rdsys#189)
     Next week:
         - don't distribute blocked-in bridges in moat and https (rdsys#204)
         - gettor updater should send links to github/gitlab (rdsys#189)



Shelikhoo: 2024-08-22
     Last Week:
             - Chrome Manifest V3 transition: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/29#note_3035763
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/merge_requests/79
             - Merge request reviews
     Next Week/TODO:
         - Merge request reviews
         - Release Manifest V3

onyinyang: 2023-08-22
     Last week(s):
         - continue with key rotation integration work


     Next week:
         - continue with key rotation integration work
         - collect issues and TODOs for all Lox work that needs to be 
done before deployment
         - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974
         - Work on outstanding milestone issues:
             in particular: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/69
             - key rotation automation

         Later:
         - begin implementing some preliminary user feedback mechanism 
to identify bridge blocking based on Vecna's work
         - improve metrics collection/think about how to show Lox is 
working/valuable
         - sketch out Lox blog post/usage notes for forum

     (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?

theodorsm: 2024-08-22
         Last weeks:
             - Expose hooks in pion/webrtc library
         Next weeks:
             - Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases 
(DTLS: v3 and WebRTC: beta v4)
             - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls
             - Condensing thesis into paper
         Help with:
             - Feedback on thesis



Facilitator Queue:
         meskio onyinyang shelikhoo
1. First available staff in the Facilitator Queue will be the 
facilitator for the meeting
2. After facilitating the meeting, the facilitator will be moved to the 
tail of the queue

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/attachments/20240822/df40b671/attachment.sig>


More information about the tor-project mailing list