[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2024-09-12

onyinyang onyinyang at torproject.org
Thu Sep 12 18:13:24 UTC 2024


Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2024/tor-meeting.2024-09-12-16.03.html

And our meeting pad:

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

Next meeting: Thursday, September 19 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: 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 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 ==

     * https://bridges.torproject.org and moat are now served by rdsys

== Discussion ==

     * shadow integration for snowflake catching some good stuff
         * backwards compatibility break in snowflake!381
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/381#note_3071161
         * problem with pion/webrtc or pion/transport dependency upgrade 
in snowflake!357
             * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/357#note_3076532
         * do we want to create integration tests for other projects?
             * yes!!!

     * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315#note_3055755
         * A regression is required for snowflake with this UDP-like 
transport mode merge request
             * longer-term goal is to retain backward compatibility, 
this MR is just meant to isolate the changes required to switch 
completely to the UDP-like transport, without backward compatibility 
negotiation

     * drop in unrestricted proxies
         * 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40386
         * not urgent, but something to invetigate early next week

== Actions ==

== Interesting links ==

     * 
https://opencollective.com/censorship-circumvention/projects/snowflake-daily-operations/updates/2024-august-update
         * "??" country snowflake users? 
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/anti-censorship-team/2024-September/000354.html
     * https://mastodon.social/@tdp_org/113108525970163764
         * "We monitor traffic to www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com per 
country & got alerts that daily requests from Angola have dropped off 
loads recently. ... Digging in to the logs, looks like they removed 
their Fortigates on 6th Sept. which'd been sending 343k req/day for 
www.bbc.co.uk/, every single day!"
         * "I [Neil Craig at BBC] spoke to Fortinet about it once (and 
asked them to change how the poller works - it was originally doing 
plaintext http GET requests so I asked them to at least do HTTPS HEADs) 
- to their credit they made a real effort to help...anyway, I forget how 
often they poll but IIRC it's something like every 5 or 10s so it 
doesn't actually take all that many firewalls to get to 343K."
     * https://github.com/c-skills/passport
         * "Forwarding TCP ports through Passkey 
(https://fidoalliance.org/passkeys/) servers to bypass censorship."
         * "A quite new chapter about Hybrid Transports allows to use QR 
codes with the authenticator (in this case most likely your smart phone) 
to authenticate against a service in that authenticator and client 
platform (in this case most likely your browser) open a tunnel to send 
PDUs back and forth in a similar way that they would travel via USB or NFC."
     * https://dpidetector.org/en/
         * VPN protocols availability monitoring in Russia

== Reading group ==
     * We will discuss "SpotProxy: Rediscovering the Cloud for 
Censorship Circumvention " on September 12
         * https://www.cs-pk.com/sec24-spotproxy-final.pdf
         * https://censorbib.nymity.ch/#Kon2024b
         * 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): 2024-09-12
     Last week:
         - rebased wasm-bindgen fork onto v0.2.93
         - followed up on some meek bridge handover tasks
         - lots of reviews and gitlab todos
     This week:
         - take a look at WofWca's big changes to snowflake
         - grant writing (for conjure)
         - finish snowflake dependency upgrades that were causing problems
         - 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

dcf: 2024-09-12
     Last week:
         - read about pion SetInterfaceFilter 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40380#note_3073950
         - commented on STUN servers not supporting RFC 5780 NAT 
behavior testing 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40376#note_3073991
         - commented on snowflake proxy NAT type metrics 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/392#note_3074025
         - closed issue of stuck snowflake probetest 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40071
         - commented on storage.sync for snowflake WebExtension proxy 
consent 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake-webext/-/issues/106#note_3074046
     Next week:
         - archive snowflake webextension v0.9.0 (manifest V3)
         - comment as requested on kcp v5.6.17 upgrade 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/353#note_3067651
         - 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: 2023-09-12
     Last week:
         - switch moat and https from BridgeDB to rdsys (rdsys#218)
         - add ipversion subscription to rdsys (rdsys#221)
         - recover gitlab gettor account (rdsys#189)
         - improvements on error logs of the email distributor (rdsys!384)
         - sanitize prometheus metrics (rdsys#227)
     Next week:
         - recover github gettor (rdsys#189)
         - deploy bridgedb metrics producer (rdsys#218)


Shelikhoo: 2024-09-12
     Last Week:
          - snowflake broker update/reinstall:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40349#note_3026336
          - Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for 
Snowflake rev2( 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 
) improvements
          - Probetest Deployment 24-09-10 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40383
             - Merge request reviews
     Next Week/TODO:
         - Merge request reviews
         - snowflake broker update/reinstall:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40349#note_3026336
          - Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for 
Snowflake rev2( 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 
) improvements

onyinyang: 2023-09-12
     Last week(s):
         - finished up key rotation integration work
         - started looking into troll-patrol integration for Lox bridge 
blockage detection
     Next week:
         - continue troll-patrol integration for Lox bridge blockage 
detection
         - update lox protocols to return duplicate responses for an 
already seen request
         - Work on outstanding milestone issues:
             in particular: 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/issues/69
             - key rotation automation

         Later:
         pending decision on abandoning lox wasm in favour of some kind 
of FFI? 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/43096):
             - add pref to handle timing for pubkey checks in Tor browser
             - add trusted invitation logic to tor browser integration:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/issues/42974
         - 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: 2024-09-12
         Last weeks:
             -
         Next weeks:
             - Update Snowflake to use latest pion upstream releases, 
waiting for WebRTC v4 beta.
             - Test Snowflake fork with covert-dtls
             - Condensing thesis into paper
         Help with:
             - Feedback on thesis



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

-- 
---
onyinyang

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

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