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[tor-talk] Volunteer QA: The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance



We have a dream. We believe it is possible to produce free, secure
privacy software that is regularly used by many millions of ordinary
people all over the world. They will use it to inform themselves,
explore new and controversial ideas, communicate with one another, and
safely share things about their lives. They will do so with confidence
that so long as the software rests upon a secure foundation, it will
not betray them; in fact it *cannot* betray them, by design.

Tor Browser Bundle can be that software. Sadly, we know that it is not
yet that software. We're aware that many aspects of the Bundle are
either imperfect, incomplete, or absent entirely. We intend to work as
hard as we can to improve this situation. 

However, we also know that even the keystone of true security is not yet
properly in place. We know that we must properly deploy this keystone,
or we risk the collapse of everything we have built so far.

That keystone is the community that reviews our designs. It is the
community that audits our source code. It is the community that tests
the binaries produced from that source code. It is the community that
will verify that the binaries that we distribute are produced from that
source code and nothing else.

It is time to organize our community into place to serve as that
keystone. We cannot have true security without it.


Our plan is to start small, with manual testing and manual analysis of
each build. We will use that to incrementally work towards full
automation available to be run on any of the arbitrary platform
configurations available to the community. Runa Sandvik will begin
coordinating these releases.

We expect the process to be bumpy at first. To start, Runa will simply
give interested people a url to a release candidate with a grab bag of
urls[1] along with some basic tests to perform within some time limit
before the build is to be released. These urls will initially come from
arbitrary pages around the web, but hopefully we'll eventually distill
them into our own collection of minimal test cases[2] for which testing
is fully automated. Until that point, test pages will need to come with
a description of expected behavior and results.  We're hoping that the
community will also seek out new and useful test urls and write up
result descriptions for them.

We will soon be switching to the 10.x-ESR Firefox branch for our stable
TBBs, while concurrently maintaining an alpha series based on Rapid
Release. To minimize the incidence of surprise issues in the stable TBB
when ESR undergoes major upgrades, we will need people devoted to testing
both branches on multiple platforms. We will also need people running
auditing systems that verify the TBB they test is well behaved[3].

To participate, please inform Runa via email (runa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) which
TBB branch or branches you intend to test on which platform (Operating
System and CPU). Bonus points if you have a unique configuration such as
AntiVirus software, and/or are able to analyze TBB in an auditing
sandbox framework such as Seatbelt, AppArmor, SELinux, a firewall that
will log proxy bypass attempts, or simply with Wireshark or any other
network analyzer. Extra bonus points if you document your setup for
others to use[4].


Independent from the group Runa will coordinate, we also need people
analyzing our builds[5], to ensure against tampering at the build
machines themselves. We need to use the differences uncovered by this
analysis to work towards the ability to produce the same binary on
multiple, clean instances of build platforms which can be brought up
from scratch anywhere around the world[6].

To help us get started, we will also need people who simply create
independent builds for others to compare against our official builds. I
suspect that many reversers and hobbyists interested in learning
reversing may find devoting the system resources and time to build their
own TBB binaries a prohibitive barrier.

Basically, everyone should try to help eliminate the need for duplicate
work done by others at each step of both the QA and build inspection
processes. Similarly, we should be constantly looking to refine our
testing and analysis processes to eliminate manual labor.


Thank you all for you willingness to help. Let's work together to build
the world we want to live in.


1. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5292
2. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5750
3. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5791
4. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5767

5. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5837
6. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3688


-- 
Mike Perry

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