[tor-project] cohosh's monthly status report, August 2024

[Cecylia Bocovich]

Hi! This is my status report for contract work done in August 2024.

# Snowflake

The big task this month was rolling out the MV3 update for the Snowflake 
web extension[0]. I helped review and test those changes. I also 
followed up on a proxy count check after we had a significant drop 
caused by new requirements from the Mozilla web store[1].

We had a lot of contributions to review lately, which is great, and I 
spent some time doing reviews and issue maintenance. There was a 
dependency update for the KCP library that caused one of our tests to 
fail[2] due to a change in whether queued writes are flushed[3].

# Reputation-based bridge distribution

We're continuing work on the integration with Tor Browser. I finally got 
around to answering some questions on open merge requests about 
requirements for that[4,5], and picked up some work on maintaining our 
wasm-bindgen fork[6].

# Conjure

I worked on writing a grant to support Conjure development and 
infrastructure. We're hoping to submit this as an NSF TTP.

# Other

An ongoing issue with pluggable transports and Tor Browser are their 
large binary sizes, and restrictions for Tor Browser android. As part of 
the Firefox 128 ESR work, we needed to explore some potential 
space-saving tricks for reducing PT binary sizes[7]. The results weren't 
as useful as we hoped, but managed to reduce binary sizes a little[8].

During the week of August 12-16 I travelled to USENIX, where we 
presented our work on Snowflake.


[0] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/29
[1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/142
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/353
[3] https://github.com/xtaci/kcp-go/issues/273
[4] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1032
[5] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1090
[6] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/71
[7] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42607
[8] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40362