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[tor-project] Anti-censorship team meeting notes, 2026-10-08

Hey everyone!

Here are our meeting logs:

https://meetbot.debian.net/tor-meeting/2026/tor-meeting.2026-10-08-16.00.html

And our meeting pad:

Anti-censorship
--------------------------------

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

^^^(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: meskio
== 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 

    Projects the TPI anti-censorship team is working on:
Project 146: Expanding access to digital media through the use of secure communications, infrastructure, tools, and techniques
https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/anti-censorship/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=Project%20146
Project 170: Monitoring and reporting on censorship against the Tor network 

    epic: https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/epics/17

    Project 201: Signaling channels
board https://gitlab.torproject.org/groups/tpo/-/boards/2675?label_name[]=Project%20201 


== Announcements ==

    no anti-censorship meeting next week (October 15)


== Discussion ==

    Schedule next broker deployment
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/work_items/40573 

    Security audit work items to make public?

    TTP-05-010
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/connectivity-measurement/probeobserver/-/work_items/7 

    Protocol distributions for upgen/proteus
Question: What are the risks/costs/advantages to use a signaling channel to distribute upgen/proteus protocols as opposed to rely purely on a seed?
Argument: If we want to maximize protocols diversity (and we should!) I don't see any reason to restrict the search space artificially (which also add infrastructe cost and risk of censorship), if we ever need to do some change in that regards (protocol distribution) we can release a new version of the PT. 


== Actions ==



== Interesting links ==

    https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/603#issuecomment-5817192874
"To my surprise, tor snowflake is fully working again (the same near 100% success rate), even with default bridge lines."
"Also I've noticed that stuns or server hellos sometimes arrive from client ips that got blocked (lost connection with), after a delay of ~300 seconds." 


== 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? 

    Next in the Reading Group Queue:



== 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): 2026-10-08

    Last week:

      - deployed a new version of the broker and then rolled it back
- debugged and fixed client and proxy STUN candidate issues (snowflake#40561) 

      - applied fix for TTP-05-005 and made issue public

      - closed TTP-05-006 WP1 as wontfix and made it public

      - wrote a fix for a bug in proxy --outbound-address functionality

      - opened issue about broker deployment (snowflake#40573)

      - wrote a patch for TTP-05-008

    Next week:

      - continue review of UAT (team#178)
- make proxy-bridge reachability checks robust to bridge outages (snowflake#40504)
- research working group tasks: open issues for relevant pets/foci papers 

      - open issue about ASL19 report suggestions





dcf: 2026-08-20

    Last week:

    Next week:

    Help with:


meskio: 2026-10-08
    Last week:
- publish debian packages of lyrebird and attempt of snowflake (tpa/team#42591) - https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/wikis/Processes/Publish-debian-packages 
        - release lyrebird (lyrebird!240)
- stop fetching builtin bridges from TB repo, use a local config (rdsys#312) 
        - research existing DNS transports (team#199)
    Next week:
        - AFK


Shelikhoo: 2026-09-24
    Last Week:
- [Testing] Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 ) testing environment setup/research 

    - Merge request Reviews

    - [Develop] Work on TLSDelegate development

    - (Undisclosed work)

    Next (working) Week/TODO:
        - Merge request reviews
- [Deployment]Unreliable+unordered WebRTC data channel transport for Snowflake rev2 (cont.)( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/merge_requests/315 ) Building custom Tor Browser with patch applied 
        - Vantage point maintaince
- [Research] proxy pool overload and potential blocking in Iran ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 )
- [Research] Add three NAT type buckets to the snowflake broker ( https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40077#note_3361718 ) 

    - Add 3 type nat bucket to snowflake broker

    - Implement TLS Delegate in Rust (cont.)


onyinyang: 2026-10-01

    Last week(s):

    - P170 tasks

    - fixed stats to flag bridges

    - started on user report API

    - SOTO planning

    Next week:

     - Continue tasks for project #170

    - send flagged bridges to vantage point or else collect them to be sent
- develop reasonable API to collect user reports of blocked bridges from TB 


   Switch back to some of these:
       As time allows:
          - Continue work on rdsys#196
- Continue Investigating rdsys#248 i.e., why dysfunctional webtunnel bridges are being distributed 

    - Troubleshooting conjure not connecting in China

    - waiting for more information from conjure authors/maintainers
- Lox still seems to be filling up the disk on the rdsys-test server despite changes made to delete old entries, look into what's going wrong
Blog post for conjure: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/conjure/-/issues/46 - review Tor browser Lox integration https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/applications/tor-browser/-/merge_requests/1300 
              - add TTL cache to lox MR for duplicate responses:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/lox/-/merge_requests/305 


    - Work on outstanding milestone issues:

    - 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!):
- 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: 2026-05-28

    Last weeks:

    - Researching possible DTLS block in Russia

    - https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/603#issuecomment-4451730751

    - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

    Next weeks:

    - Implementing DTLS 1.3 in pion

    Help with:

    -




Facilitator Queue:

    shelikhoo meskio onyinyang cohosh
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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