iran

September 2009 Progress Report

phobos — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 05:16:46 -0700

Here's what the Tor Project accomplished in September 2009.

New Hires

Carolyn Anhalt is our new Translation and Community Manager. Carolyn has years of experience managing and growing content translation, as well as wrangling online communities and developing volunteer moderators and support roles from the community. She’s fluent or conversant in a number of languages, such as: Russian, French, English, German, Italian, and Welsh. Carolyn’s initial goals are to grow the translator community to keep everything Tor translated, work out better translation tools for translators, and to generally assist translators.
Karen Reilly joins us as our Development Director. Karen has years of experience in growing both community-based and foundation-based funding, as well as helping to fulfill the mission of organizations through outreach and community-building. Karen’s initial goals are to further develop community funding, work with our current donors, help create an annual report, and expand Tor’s outreach efforts.

New Funding

Tor and Drexel University receive a grant from the National Science Foundation to research “Privacy-preserving measurements of the Tor network to improve performance and anonymity”.
Tor and ITT receive a grant from the Naval Research Laboratory to research “Tor Networks Trust-Based Routing Research & Design Support”.

New Releases

On September 23rd, we released Tor version 0.2.2.3-alpha. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0223alpha-released
On September 21, we released Tor version 0.2.2.2-alpha. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-0222alpha-released
On September 7, we released Vidalia 0.2.4. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/vidalia-024-released
On September 11, we released Tor Browser Bundle version 1.2.9. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-bundle-129-released

Design, develop, and implement enhancements that make
Tor a better tool for users in censored countries.

Jacob Appelbaum and Nathan Frietas developed a fully functional Tor for the Android mobile operating system. It is currently being tested before being released to the Android Marketplace. This Android application uses mainline Tor as written in C, rather than porting/creating a Tor client in Java. Others have started discussions and coding around using Java to create a Tor-compatible client. A new mailing list was created to encourage this community to grow, http://archives.seul.org/tor/java/.
Damian Johnson further developed arm, https://svn.torproject.org/svn/arm/trunk/. Arm is a command line application for monitoring Tor relays, providing real time status information such as the current configuration, bandwidth usage, message log, connections, etc. This uses a curses interface much like ’top’ does for system usage. The application is intended for command-line aficionados, ssh connections, and anyone stuck with a tty terminal for checking their relay’s status.
Added two new Tor website and software distribution mirrors. Update list of current mirrors to reflect their current status of how current the mirrors are compared to the main torproject.org website.

Architecture and technical design docs for Tor enhancements
related to blocking-resistance.

A paper entitled, “On the risks of serving whenever you surf: Vulnerabilities in Tor’s blocking resistance design”, discussing risks in running a bridge is to be relased at Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2009), http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#wpes09-bridge-attack.
Started development of “marco” to quickly scan for Tor relay and brige reachability from a client machine. This utility was used successfully by volunteers inside Iran and China to determine how much of the Tor network is blocked and how such blocking is occurring.

Outreach and Advocacy

Roger, Paul Syverson, and Andrew gave a Tor lecture to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation Operational Technology Division as part of their quarterly series of talks on new technology. Had a follow-on conversation with a Supervisory Special Agent about how to use Tor tools safely in the field.
Roger and Andrew had a meeting with the US Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section to present what Tor is and how it works. We also discussed issues and challenges in their usage of, and prosecuting criminals using, Tor.
Roger and Andrew met with a Senior Policy Advisor from Senator Harry Reid’s office to discuss online privacy and anonymity.
Roger is working with a freshman class at KAIST in South Korea to develop Tor bridge relay distribution strategies. More information can be found at https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bridge-distribution-strategies.

Preconfigured privacy (circumvention) bundles for USB or LiveCD.

On September 11, we released Tor Browser Bundle version 1.2.9. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-browser-bundle-129-released

Bridge relay and bridge authority work.

Deployed a temporary workaround for a vidalia/tor bug where bridges don’t work if you provide a fingerprint and the bridge authority is unreachable. Discovered this bug on September 25 when China blocked the bridge authority.
Started fixing bridge statistics that have been broken in all 0.2.2.x versions. Plan to test the fixes in the next few days and include the changes in 0.2.2.5-alpha.

Scalability, load balancing, directory overhead, efficiency.

A research paper on scaling our directory design, “Scalable onion routing with Torsk” is to be presented at CCS 2009, http://freehaven.net/anonbib#ccs09-torsk.
Deployed Mike Perry’s Bandwidth Authority code to the Directory Authorities. The bandwidth authorities are now voting on measured bandwidth from relays and giving out this information in extra-info fields to Tor clients. Tor 0.2.1 and 0.2.2 clients make routing decisions based on these extra-info data. This should spread traffic across relays and improve overall performance of the Tor network.
Included the results of Mike’s bandwidth scanner in the votes of gabelmoo. Helped evaluating the (impressive) performance improvements as seen by torperf, https://git.torproject.org/checkout/metrics/master/report/performance/to.... Initial results imply a 30-50% increase in performance.
Evaluated how the reduction of circuit windows from 1000 to 101 cells affects performance. The last report includes 40 KiB, 50 KiB, and 1 MiB downloads, https://git.torproject.org/checkout/metrics/master/report/circwindow/cir....
Evaluated how Mike’s buildtimes patch influences Tor performance, https://git.torproject.org/checkout/metrics/master/report/buildtimes/bui....
Wrote a script that parses descriptor archives to tell whether an IP address was a Tor relay at a given time, https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/archives/trunk/exonerator/HOWTO.
Restarted the autonaming script on September 20, so that gabelmoo will be naming relays again soon.
Fixed the remaining bugs in the proposal 166 implementation. Relays can now include their statistics in extra-info descriptors. Further testing this on select relays for a few more days. Soon will ask people on or-dev to turn on statistics as soon as tests are successful and 0.2.2.4-alpha is out.

Translation work, ultimately a browser-based approach.

Released Runa’s code to allow website translation from our Translation Portal, https://translation.torproject.org. Runa wrote up her ideas and Google Summer of Code experiences at http://blog.torproject.org/blog/website-translation-support-translationt....
Continued work on website to translation portal code.
17 Polish website updates.
27 Italian website updates.
Romanian and Chinese updates to the check.torproject.org website.
1 update to German torbutton translation.
23 updates to Romanian torbutton translation.
115 updates to Polish torbutton translation.
115 updates to Mandarin Chinese torbutton translation.

CIMA/NED Panel on Iran and New Media

phobos — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:10:05 -0700

I was invited to join a panel discussion on Iran and New Media hosted by the Center for International Media Assistance and the National Endowment for Democracy. The full 90 minute video is now online; as is my presentation.

The general overview of the panel is http://cima.ned.org/events/new-media-in-iran.html

The direct link to the video on Vimeo is http://www.vimeo.com/5496977

A number of press people talked to me afterwards, including Al-Jazeera. There were reporters from Xinhua and China Daily in the audience as well. These reporters paid close attention to anything I said about China.

I spoke about what I knew and generally tried to avoid starting international incidents. A few of my answers to questions rambled a bit.

All in all it was a great panel and I learned more about what goes on inside Iran from the different panelists.

Measuring Tor and Iran (Part two)

karsten — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:25:51 -0700

Two weeks ago we posted early measurements about the growth of Tor usage in Iran. Since then we have improved our math, and used more data sources. This work is part of our metrics project, where we're learning about the Tor network to improve its availability and performance while keeping our users safe.

The first graph shows the estimated number of new and returning Tor clients per day coming from China and Iran. So for example, there were around 7800 new and returning Iranian Tor users on June 24. By "returning", we mean Tor clients that were off for at least several days, so they didn't have cached directory information. We added China as a comparison for the Iran numbers: you can see the results of the recent Green Dam fiasco and attempts to block Google services. Many more details and math are here.

The second graph shows the growth in bridge users coming from Iran and China. Bridges are like normal relays except that they are not listed in a public directory and therefore they're harder to block. We show "growth compared to June 1" because we don't yet have a good estimate of the absolute number of bridge users. The number is probably an order of magnitude smaller than the number of "regular" Tor users. But still, we can say that bridge usage from Iran has boosted to 950% as compared to June 1. For more information on these numbers see this report.

While it is great to see that so many people in Iran find the Tor network useful, we should continue our attempts to make Tor even better. Your contribution could be to set up a bridge or relay as many others recently did. You might also consider setting up an exit relay, possibly with the help of these instructions. But middle nodes and bridges are helping as well!

Measuring Tor and Iran

phobos — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:35:08 -0700

I've been fielding some calls from the press about Tor and Iran. Someone quoted me as saying "double the clients from Iran over the past few days". We wondered, what are the real numbers? What does our network see from Iran? Is port 443 or https:// really blocked? Here's what we've discovered in the past day of working with the new metrics we've developed to be safe to collect without compromising anyone's anonymity.

This first dataset is from one of the Directory Authorities. We have six authorities, so a plausible scaling factor is 6, assuming all authorities are seeing equal requests (it could be more or less than 6, too). We don't know if the authorities are seeing equal requests, as they listen on different TCP ports, are located in different parts of the world, and clients will chose one randomly. This graph roughly shows the number of requests from new Tor clients coming from IP addresses that our geoip database reports as Iran.

UPDATE 2009-06-24: Updated the graph with numbers through yesterday

The second dataset is from one Directory Mirror, of which there are hundreds. This mirror is only accessible on port 443, which is rumored to be blocked in parts of Iran over the past few days.

The data points in the second graph are very rough, since they're an estimate of the total number of Tor users in Iran based on numbers from only one relay. In addition, we looked at some other relays running on port 443, and they also didn't show anywhere near the spike that we see in the directory authority graph above. The authority isn't listening on 443 -- perhaps that means there's some truth to the rumors that port 443 has been blocked recently in Iran. We look forward to having more precise data later on.