[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-05-09

Shelikhoo shelikhoo at torproject.org
Thu May 9 16:42:39 UTC 2024


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-05-09-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday, May 16 16:00 UTC
Facilitator: onyinyang
^^^(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 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 ==

     * No meeting May 23, we are at the tormeeting

== Discussion ==

     * should we start assigning/distributing webtunnel bridges in the 
settings pool?
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/web/community/-/issues/348#note_3026653
         * we agree it makes sense to start collecting bridges in the 
settings pool
         * meskio will configure rdsys to so after deploying the 
persistency for bridges in rdsys
     * Reports that our CDN 77 front domains are blocked in Russia?
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/blob/tor-browser-115.11.0esr-13.5-1/browser/app/profile/000-tor-browser.js#L110
         * we'll keep an eye to see if there is some confirmation of the 
block and start looking for alternatives

== Actions ==


== Interesting links ==

     * https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0027.php
         * Communication Breakdown: Modularizing Application Tunneling 
for Signaling Around Censorship
         * "The Raceboat framework simplifies using signaling channels 
for low-bandwidth and/or latency-tolerant tasks like bridge distribution 
and authentication. ... We also have a suite of non-decomposed channels 
that have been wrapped to support the Raceboat channel APIs. These 
include wrappers around several higher-bandwidth direct channels (Obfs, 
Snowflake, and Balboa)..."
         * (NB the demonstration application is using Obfs and Snowflake 
as a rendezvous channel, not providing a rendezvous channel for them.)
         * https://github.com/tst-race/raceboat-pets2024 (currently empty)

== Reading group ==
     * We will discuss "Communication Breakdown: Modularizing 
Application Tunneling for Signaling Around Censorship" on May 30
         * https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0027.php
         * 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): 2024-05-09
     Last week:
         - Updated dependencies for various projects
         - Shadow simulations
             - https://github.com/cohosh/ptnettools
         - Lox-wasm integration test fixups
         - Opened an issue about Lox blockage migration
     This week:
         - upload new snowflake-webext version 0.8.2 to both Firefox and 
Chrome web stores
         - make changes to Lox encrypted bridge table
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/147
         - follow up on reported SQS errors
         - update wasm-bindgen fork to fix some bugs and hopefully 
upstream changes
         - create a Lox test environment and instructions for the 
browser team
             - 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42503
     Needs help with:

dcf: 2024-05-09
     Last week:
         - allocated new VPS for snowflake broker 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40349#note_3026336
         - archived snowflake-webext 0.8.1 
https://archive.org/details/snowflake-webextension-0.8.1
         - posted questions about periodic(?) changes in the estimated 
number of users of the snowflake-01 bridge 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40355#note_3026335
     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:

meskio: 2023-05-09
     Last week:
         - test email distributor in rdsys (rdsys#186)
         - extract safelog and prometheus ronded metrics from snowflake 
into ptutil (snowflake#40354)
         - look into renovate errors in rdsys, but still not clue 
(rdsys!305)
         - update and merge the bridge distribution documentation in 
rdsys (rdsys!295)
     Next week:
         - improve privacy on rdsys metrics reusing snowflake techniques 
(rdsys#203)
         - produce the same metrics of BridgeDB in rdsys (rdsys#188)


Shelikhoo: 2024-05-09
     Last Week:
         - [Merge Request Waiting] Add Container Image Mirroring from 
Tor Gitlab to Docker 
Hub(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/280)
         - [Merge Request Merged] Fix ipv6 connectivity with restricted 
address 
support(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/webtunnel/-/merge_requests/22)
         - [Issue] Design a new Constructor Design for Snowflake 
(https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40359)
             - [Dev] Snowflake Performance Improvement
             - Upgrade snowflake broker machine from Debian 10 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40349
             - Merge request reviews
                 - Merge request reviews
     Next Week/TODO:
         - Revise Snowflake Performance Improvement MR(cont.)
         - Merge request reviews



onyinyang: 2023-05-02
     Last week(s):
         - Responding to pre-existing MR reviews and other 
notifications/questions in gitlab

     This week:
         - attempt hyper upgrade and tokio upgrade
     Probably next week and beyond:
         - preparing for upcoming panel (maybe)
         - implement 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: 2023-04-25
         Last weeks:
             - Extended Pion dtls library to support hooking of client 
hellos, server hellos and certificate request (PR: 
https://github.com/pion/dtls/pull/631). Fingerprint generation of 
firefox and chrome + mimicking using the client hello hook have been 
moved to its own repo: https://github.com/theodorsm/covertDTLS
             - Analyzed the snowflake captures done in "Snowflake 
Anonymous Network Traffic Identification" paper: no handshakes found, so 
not relevant for me
             - Verified the consistency of the fingerprint generation
         Next weeks:
             - Add hook to pion/webrtc so it can be used in snowflake.
             - Test and validate mimicked client hello with snowflake.
             - Add randomized fingerprint
         Help with:



Facilitator Queue:
     onyinyang meskio 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

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