[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2022-09-29

meskio · September 29, 2022, 5:16pm

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2022/tor-meeting.2022-09-29-15.58.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship work meeting pad

···

--------------------------------

Next meeting: Thursday Oct 6 16:00 UTC

Weekly meetings, every Thursday at 16:00 UTC, in #tor-meeting at OFTC
(channel is logged while meetings are in progress)

== 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 Tor.

== Links to Useful documents ==

  * Our anti-censorship roadmap:
    * Roadmap: Development · Boards · Anti-censorship · GitLab
  * The anti-censorship team's wiki page:
    * Home · Wiki · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
  * Past meeting notes can be found at:
    * The tor-project Archives
  * Tickets that need reviews: from sponsors we are working on:
    * All needs review tickets:
      * Merge requests · Anti-censorship · GitLab
    * Sponsor 28
      * must-do tickets: Sponsor 28: Reliable Anonymous Communication Evading Censors and Repressors (RACECAR) · The Tor Project · GitLab
      * possible tickets: Issues · The Tor Project · GitLab
    * Sponsor 96
      * Sponsor 96: Rapid Expansion of Access to the Uncensored Internet through Tor in China, Hong Kong, & Tibet · The Tor Project · GitLab

== Announcements ==

*

== Discussion ==

  * snowflake-01 bridge resources
    * [anti-censorship-team] Need to increase number of tor instances on snowflake-01 bridge, increased usage since yesterday and following
    * summary of optimizations so far: Iran: Circumventing Censorship with Tor - #20 by dcf
      * cumulative merge request Draft: Server performance improvements (!100) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
    * the bridge is doing about 2.5 Gbps for most of the day, but it clearly has hit some kind of resource limitation, even with apparent CPU and RAM headroom
    * current thinking is that it has to do with conntrack in the kernel and perhaps network interface driver tuning
      * [anti-censorship-team] Need to increase number of tor instances on snowflake-01 bridge, increased usage since yesterday
    * will require some preparation and a reboot, planned to happen later today
      * move some operation to second NIC snowflake-01: Connect the other NIC and move wireguard and sshd to it (#40186) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      * disable conntrack snowflake-01: Disable conntrack (#40189) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
      * reboot snowflake-01: Disable conntrack (#40189) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake · GitLab
  * Snowflake Enable Distributed Snowflake Support at broker src shell
    * Investigate Distributed Snowflake Rollout Issue (#95) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
    * we are blocked to enable it as it will reject all proxies that are not updated, mostly standalone proxies
    * 28% of the unrestricted proxies haven't updated
    * current Tor Browser's snowflake-client doesn't have relay URL support, we need to change that: Bump snowflake version to 9ce1de4eee4e (#40629) · Issues · The Tor Project / Applications / tor-browser-build · GitLab
    * we will try to reject old proxy next Monday, and a revert guide will be prepared by shelikhoo to help every team member revert this chance as if needed
  * snowflake proxy resources
    * [anti-censorship-team] Need to increase number of tor instances on snowflake-01 bridge, increased usage since yesterday and following
    * there is a squeeze on proxies with unrestricted NAT
    * merge request to have existing proxies provide more service: Unrestricted polls (!47) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake WebExtension · GitLab
    * had probetest restart itself more frequently, 4h instead of 7d [anti-censorship-team] Not enough unrestricted Snowflake proxy polls
  * Moat went down, has now been fixed
    * Too many file descriptors issue, probably from increased load
    * meskio will regenerate the captchas
  * Iran obfs4 block by protocol src shell
    * Tor censorship in Iran (#96) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
    * a connection to fresh new private bridge was blocked when crossing the Iranian border
    * Iran might be blocking random looking protocols, or just anything they can't recognize

== 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): last updated 2022-09-29
  Last week:
    - monitored snowflake proxy pool
    - implemented more frequent polling and higher max clients for unrestricted proxies
      - Unrestricted polls (!47) · Merge requests · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake WebExtension · GitLab
    - set timeout for probetest to 4h
      - [anti-censorship-team] Not enough unrestricted Snowflake proxy polls
    - answered forum posts and did some ticket maintenance
    - handled moat outage
      - moat-shim keeps crashing (#121) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / rdsys · GitLab
  This week:
    - continue monitoring snowflake proxy pool and implement some improvements
    - resume Conjure work
    - wrap up manifest v3 candidate
  Needs help with:

meskio: 2022-09-29
   Last week:
       - try and fail to do the final deploy of rdsys-gettor
       - catch up after two weeks AFK
       - set up a Bridge for Iran
   Next week:
       - deploy rdsys-gettor
       - fix language issues in BridgeDB (bridgedb#40056)

Shelikhoo: 2022-09-29
   Last Week:
    - [Merge Request Awaiting] Add SOCKS5 forward proxy support to snowflake (snowflake!64)
    - [Discussion & Deployment] Rollout of Distributed Snowflake Support
    - [Coding & Deployment] Proposal: Centralized Probe Result Collector (anti-censorship/team#54)
    - [Research] HTTPT Planning Add HTTPT as a pluggable transport to Tor Browser (#1) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / HTTPT · GitLab
    - [Research] Generate Charts for presention: Prepare for s28 PI and ECP presentations: Oct 31 and Nov 1-2 2022 (#92) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab
    - [Research] Iran 2 hop Bridge investigation (Tor censorship in Iran (#96) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab, Tutorial: setting up a Tor bridge for Iran · Issue #127 · net4people/bbs · GitHub)
    - [Research] Investigate Distributed Snowflake Rollout Issue (Investigate Distributed Snowflake Rollout Issue (#95) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab)
   Next Week:
    - [Research] WebTunnel Planning (Continue)
    - Generate Charts for presention: Prepare for s28 PI and ECP presentations: Oct 31 and Nov 1-2 2022 (#92) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Team · GitLab (Continue)
    - [Research] Add upload connection info to rdsys in WebTunnel
    - [Research] Fix vantage point summary upload in China

Itchy Onion: 2022-09-29
    Last week:
        - update snowflake plugin API to RACE 2.3.0
        - continue debugging the message dropping issue
    This week:
        - continue debugging the message dropping issue

--
meskio | https://meskio.net/
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My contact info: https://meskio.net/crypto.txt
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Nos vamos a Croatan.