[tor-talk] obfsproxy and windows

[eliaz <eliaz@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Though AFAICT my bridge is configured correctly, it appears to carry
very little traffic. This has raised a number of questions regarding the
use of vanilla and obfuscated clients & bridges in windows.

I run a bridge on Win 7, with Tor 0.2.4.24 (git-a8a38e5dd1fbb67a) in its
own folder, with standalone Vidalia running off a USB stick. I have the
same setup for a Tor client on a different machine on the same LAN. I
configure the client as obfsproxy-capable or plain as a way to teach
myself about obfuscated clients. Once the Tor circuits come up, I open
torbirdied thunderbird for e-mail.

The Client: I've been surprised to see that messages under obfsproxy
generally go about as fast as plain ones. Are there enough obfsproxy
servers that my mail isn't slowing things down for people who really
need obfuscation? I guess another way of asking this would be, Is Tor
obfuscation now robust enough so that everyone may as well use it?

If the client is configured to be obfsproxy-capable, can it still avail
itself of vanilla bridges?

The Bridge: I'm currently running it as what I take to be
obfsproxy-aware. That is, after rummaging around the sparse windows
documentation, I've written

"ClientTransportPlugin obfs2,obfs3 exec
Tor\PluggableTransports\obfsproxy managed"

into the torrc. AFAIK this is all one must do to change a vanilla bridge
into an obfsproxy-aware one. Is that correct?

Will the obfsproxy-aware bridge also accept traffic from non-obfuscated
clients? In other words, does  it make sense to write something like

Bridge obfs3 w.x.y.z:80 ...
Bridge a.b.c.d:443 ...

into torrc of obfsproxy-configured clients?

I realize one wouldn't ordinarily want to do this; one either needs
obfuscation or one does not. I ask the question because I'm trying to
understand how obfuscation works. I would've tried setting up such a
client myself, except that I've lost access to the remote-ISP client
that I had used to test such ideas.

These days I'm lucky if "Who has used my bridge?" shows one or two 1-8
entries once every two weeks or so. Looking at Globe/Onionoo and the
relay DBs, I see that though the bridge's advertized BW runs between 20
and 40 kB/s, the actually used mean written/mean read traffic is in the
100s/10s-Byte range. for either my vanilla or obfsproxy-aware
configurations. Does this simply mean that there are enough bridges so
that any particular one isn't called on too often? That is, is the
behavior I'm seeing typical? Or am I doing some thing(s) wrong? I'd be
much obliged for any feedback. - eliaz



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