[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-02-01

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu Feb 1 17:09:53 UTC 2024


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-02-01-15.58.html

And our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday, February 8 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: cohosh

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 ==

     * 0.4.7.x EOL:"~964 bridges, which means roughly 45% of the 
advertised bridges bandwidth)" 
https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-psa-tor-0-4-7-reaches-end-of-life-eol-on-2024-01-31/11157
     * PSA: Elections in Pakistan February 8th.

== Discussion ==

     * Tor Browser binaries are getting too big, can we reduce the size 
of PTs?
         * TB 13.0.9 was initially rejected by Google, compressed with 
7-zip as a temporary workaround.
         * Could possibly combine multiple Go executables into one (so 
as to ship only one Go runtime), similar to how IPtProxy does it.
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser-build/-/issues/13770
             * There's a possible difficulty in reconciling all the 
possibly different version numbers of the dependencies of constituent 
programs.
             * https://github.com/u-root/gobusybox
         * Or, instead of independent executables, can make a new 
unified pluggable transport client dispatcher, that decides which 
transports to instantiate using the normal TOR_PT_CLIENT_TRANSPORTS etc. 
mechanism.
         * Merging webtunnel + lyrebird could be a good first step 
(shelikhoo will create an issue to track this)
     * Add WebTunnel built-in bridge in TB or does it need more testing?
         * As a way of educating users and operators about this new PT
         * Discussion on the use of builtin bridges: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/102
         * First step is to find an operator
             * builtin bridge informal requirements: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Default-Bridges#adding-new-default-bridges

== 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): 2024-02-01
     Last week:
         - Lox Tor Browser integration
             - finished Lox module implementation
             - wrote up testing documentation for code auditors
         - SQS rendezvous deployment
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40323
     This week:
         - open issue to update snowflake version for tor browser to 
include SQS rendezvous
         - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully 
upstream changes
         - tor-browser-build updates for lox wasm + bindings generation
         - rebase and try out manifest v3 patch
         - Conjure bridge maintenance
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-02-01
     Last week:
     Next week:
         - review draft MR for unreliable data channels 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/219
         - 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:

meskio: 2023-12-21
     Last week:
         - grant writing
     Next week:


Shelikhoo: 2024-02-01
     Last Week:
                 - HTTPS distributors in rdsys: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
                 - Inspect Snowflake Situation In China
                 - Merge request reviews
     Next Week/TODO:
                 - HTTPS distributors in rdsys: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/rdsys/-/issues/191
                 - Update WebTunnel Container Image
                 - Inspect Snowflake Situation In China

onyinyang: 2023-02-01
     Last week(s):
         - Bug fixing and other things that come up as lox integration 
is rolled out
             - Started writing tests to figure out problem that makes 
distributor hang when bridges are not working
             - fixing a number of things that are not working as 
expected with sync functiosn

     This week:
         - Continuing with bug fixing and other things that come up as 
lox integration is rolled out
             - Finish up fixing problems with syncing functions
             - Make Lox invitation endpoint only accessible via telegram
         - attempt hyper upgrade again

     (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: 2023-01-11
         Last weeks:
             - Currently in the start phase of writing my master thesis 
(to be finished late june 2024) in communication technology on reducing 
distinguishability of DTLS. The goal is to implement a validated DTLS 
anti-fingerprinting library similar to uTLS (useful for Snowflake).
         Next weeks:
             - Talk with Sean DuBois about contributing to adding 
anti-fingerprinting capabilities to the pion library
         Help with:
             - Find recent data set of captured DTLS traffic
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