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Herald: Our next speakers are Gus and GeKo from the Tor project. They both came on
onto the project. A couple have been working with the project for a long time
now, and a couple of years ago, they both came on as employees. Gus, as the team
leader, as the community lead of the project and Georg as the network team
leader, who has been working on improving the health of the network and making sure
that bad relays are removed. Give them all a great round of applause from home and
welcome to the stage, guys. Take it away.
Georg: Hello, everyone, hello. This is Georg from the Tor project, and I have got
with me today to talk about the State of the Onion, a yearly thing, and we are
really happy to be here at the CCC and think about providing an update, what we
did, what we are excited about next year and what is basically in the pipeline.
Before we start, assuming we have some folks watching this talk, wondering what
this Tor thing is? We thought about picking them up, getting them up to speed
and talking about what we are actually talking about here. So, Tor is concerned
with the online anonymity and censorship circumvention. It's referred to as free
software, and we actually have an open network of relay operators and relays and
operated by volunteers. But that's not the only meaning of Tor. You find you are as
well, you know, in a community of researchers, developers, users, and you
mentioned relay operators. As a project. We are a US 501c3 nonprofit organization.
So, that's the different notions of Tor you might encounter. So, what is actually
the Tor design? How does it help with the anonymity goal or censorship circumvention
goal? So, I assume you have two parties who want to communicate over the internet,
and they want particular. Alice wants to hide the location of their IP address, so
they can connect directly to Bob because that would be obvious where they are
coming from. So, they try to get their traffic through multiple relays. So, no
single relay can actually betray Alice here and find out now what Alice is up to,
or actually, where she is coming from. So, what Alice is doing, or actually Alice's
Tor-client on her machine is picking a path through the network where through
relays mentioned here with R1, R2 and R3 before she's finally reaching Bob. So,
this looks like some something like this here, and at the end, Alice is asking the
exit relay or relay three on this slide to connect to Bob, and then they can talk to
each other. That's the basic underlying concept of Tor. Then there's the problem
that we sometimes see censorship in the wild, which means that adversaries trying
to prevent Alice from actually reaching the Tor-Network and so that she can
benefit from the privacy properties that the Network is providing. And in this
case, the direct connection to the cloud above there with the public relays as
presented. And what Alice needs to do is to connect to so-called bridges, which are
nonpublic relays in this case, which bridge work as a first hop. And then she
is picking the usual remaining two hops before connecting to Bob. So, this is a
rough idea of how Tor is trying to prevent censorship. Or to bypass censorship to be
more correctly and which will play a role in the coming slides because we talk a
bunch about censorship, work we do and have done and want to do. So, that's
basically Tor in a nutshell. That's there are many more things to Tor, but that's
hopefully enough to understand what the following updates are about. So, if you
recall the previous slides, that was basically trying to provide privacy at the
network layer for users hiding the IP addresses. But as we know, the web, in
particular browsers, are large beasts, and that's by far not enough anymore to
guarantee any meaningful privacy on the internet because of all of the tracking
mechanisms and arrays of fingerprint users. So, a couple of years ago, we
essentially started to provide a tool called Tor Browser, which is essentially a
fork of Firefox and has dozens of patches on top of that. So, we can actually
provide the privacy guarantees we think are important. And this tool got some, you
know, some meaningful updates over the year. And one of these is that we
overhauled the Tor connection experience. Some of you who are already familiar with
Tor browser, know about this weird modal dialog popping up once. This is (virtual)
browser, which was, up until the Tor browser 10.5, the default way of
connecting to the tunnel broker program, the Tor browser. And this is gone because
that's a really weird experience if you have any other browser, what is happening
once you started? You get a browser window and then start searching or typing or
whatever. You never get any modal dialog, which is a UX experience, which is not
really the best. So we fixed that. There's no modal dialog during startup anymore,
and there are easy ways to an easy way to connect automatically now. So, you don't
even see this particular sort of screen anymore, or was giving you much smoother
experience for your Tor browser usage, which is pretty exciting. Then we finally
deployed Snowflake, which is a means for helping censored users on the internet,
which is, you know, kind of next, next, next-level step in the arms race against
censors. And this has been in the works for a couple of years and has been testing
for months in our alpha release series and finally made it earlier this year and
stable. And you can see in this on this graph how the usage grew over time,
starting with the initial launch and the stable series at the beginning of July
this year. You see, there's a continually growing numbers of snowflake users you see
at the right side, the despite up and down, and we'll talk about this a bit
later. But it's a growth, and we can see this, and we can hear the feedback for
users. So, what you can help is. Running snowflakes, how this was going to work is
a thing Gus will explain later on. But that's already a thing you can try to
remember and getting out of this talk, so you can help censored users. Um, yeah,
that's two of the high notes for this year for the next year and upcoming years, we
plan to make it even easier to help censored users around the world, for
instance, by faster updating the D4 bridges. we ship with the Tor browser.
Usually, what's happening right now is that once we want to bundle new bridges to
Tor browser, we have to have a new release, which is pretty cumbersome and
slow, and we want to make this faster that you can keep your Tor browser but get
updated bridges if there are any available which we can ship. And then we continue
working on the general idea of just helping users bypassing the censorship,
though they should have a button like "I am censored" and then Tor browser should
figure out everything it needs to provide working bridges for the user and the
particular region where they are. That's the kind of the golden standard we want to
get to. So, this will be pretty exciting work then for another project, actually a
multi-year project, which we recently started, I want you to give an update. The
Tor browser thing is pretty cool in the sense that you have an app, and then you
have per app settings kind per app means of providing privacy properties, but
particularly on Mobile, where you have kind of dozens or hundreds of apps. It's
pretty cumbersome if it's usable or possible at all to configure. Every app to
every app to use Tor as a proxy, so what we want, or we actually want to what you
just want on mobile at least, is a way to him to route all safe traffic and specific
safe applications through Tor. You don't want to configure this per app, though.
That's that's not the way to go. That's a pretty "VPN" like functionality to do. I
put "VPN" in quotes here because that's kind of a working, you know, concept we
would probably want to come up with the better term at the final product, because
VPN is kind of tainted and people have particular understandings of what this
means. VPN is, and you have kind of a new tool here which was trying to fill the
niche and provide better guarantees than regular VPNs do. So, we want probably come
up with a different term. But that's pretty close from the functionality point
of view. What we want to do and the bonus points here as well are that, We can
easily expand our censorship circumvention means to the whole device and don't have
to deal with that on a per app basis, either. The work is done with our friends
from the Guardian project and the LEAP Encryption Access Project, which is
exciting, and we plan to have this available on Android first, likely
starting in 2023. Maybe already at the end of next year, we'll see. As I said, it's a
multi-year project spanning different teams at Tor. It's using Arti the new rust
based (talk line) we are currently writing. So, that's a pretty exciting
project, and we hope you make serious progress over next year. So let me leave
the application part right now and talk a bit about what we could call network
health. The one of the points which frequently comes up, which is important,
is our work in the bad relay area. All the dealing with malicious relays remains hard
with our limited resources. We removed, for instance, several large groups of
actually relays in early 2021 and used this actually as kind of a wake-up call to
seriously invest in this area, which means writing new scanners for detecting
malicious behavior and do a better monitoring for malicious behavior at the
network. And I think over the year. I'm confident to say that we actually are
going to have a safer Tor network and compared with previous years, I think it's
fair to say as well that we right now have a safer Tor network as well compared to
what we had in the previous year. So, that is exciting progress. Worth mentioning
here, but that's not enough, right? So, what we actually want to do to provide an
even safer experience and tackling the the the problem of malicious relays more at
the core, is leveraging trust in our relay community, helping with those problems.
And the key points to take away here is that is. It mixed approach in the sense
that we have technical tools helping, that really work. But as well this is a social
approach, which is important here because we can't solve the problem of malicious
relays on the technical means alone. And this is the thing we take into account
right now already started successfully, I think with experiments, for instance, we
removed like three weeks ago, two large groups of relays which we deemed to be
malicious, which were perfectly configured from a configuration perspective. Then all
the my family settings, and they had a contact info information side, which was
supposed to be non-spoofable. So, they did all the technical parts right, but still,
once we start to contact them and tried to talk to them, it was pretty clear they
were very likely malicious, and we removed them quickly from the network, which
showed us once more that there's a social component here too, which is important.
And this will be the priority for the network health team, not only for the
team. I mean, yes, the community team involved as well, and other teams too. But
it would be important for the Tor project in 2022. And what this means at the end,
you know, taking trust into account is not set yet. That could be the idea that we
say, OK, we have here a large group of trusted relays, and they get more traffic
to see a lot more traffic to see from uses compared to the non-trusted group. This
has performance implications and many other implications, which we need to
explore in detail. Starting this year, but more next year, and probably for the
coming years, which actually brings me to my final point for my part, which is
talking to you a bit about Tor performance and the work we did this year and what's
coming up next. So, if you look at these and this graph of those two graphs, you
see a growing gap between the bandwidth, which is virtualized on the network and
the actually used bandwidth over the years, starting from, you know, kind of
2011 and continuing up until today. This is kind of counterintuitive because one of
the things we usually get, as, kind of most of the most important complaint, is
that Tor is slow? So, so what's the issue here? If you have so much kind of surplus
bandwidth, but it's not getting used, but on the other hand, users are complaining
Tor is slow. So, we have a project which is trying to solve those problems. We
think that a big part of this equation is coming up in that good congestion control
for the Tor Network, which was lacking so far. So, that we have an overall better
bandwidth usage. And this could be implemented this year, which is exciting,
and will be deployed next year. And we hopefully see not this growing gap
anymore, but a shrinking gap. Additionally, one thing we sorely missed
was feedback for relay operators, whether their relays are doing well, whether they
are overloaded and whether they can improve settings and make the proper
modifications. So, we implemented a series of kind of warnings or triggers which
relay operators can monitor and we from the Tor Project side can monitor as well.
And then we can ping relay operators and helping them figure out their stuff and
getting those issues fixed. Resolving the overload they see on their relays and
planned for 2022 as well is that we start to do better load balancing by figuring
out which relays are seriously overloaded and moving traffic from them back to less
overloaded relays, giving an overall better performance and user experience for
all users. So, I think that's all I had to say from my side. Thanks for listening and
our Gus will pick this up. Gus: Thank you, Georg. So, hello. This is
Gus from the Tor project. And today I will talk a little bit about the Community Team
and our work on the Tor community, so we will cover the new user support forum, our
new gamification project. The "run a bridge" campaign that we started last
month, and we are also going to talk about the Tor censorship in Russia. So, for the
third forum, we at the beginning of this year, we start to think about having a
place where people can ask questions. That is not the mailing list. So, in 2021, what
looks like a support forum? You know how where users can do questions and receive
help. So, email and use of the communication are nice, are cool and
important because people in certain regions, they can access this resource.
They can send an email from Iran, from China, from Russia now, and they can
access our documentation. But you are thinking about, are there other ways to
reach out to this community to find places, to find a way, for them to
communicate and ask questions? So, part of GS plan is to,..., The first part of this
plan is to have a Tor forum, so people can access this information and ask questions
on your support forum. That's friendly, and you can store an app on your phone and
contact and talk with others. And later, we'll talk about the second part of this
plan. So, we launched the Tor Forum jazzier in October, and it has been very
nice, and I invite everyone to join our forum. The other project that we are doing
in the community team is the gamification project for relay operators. So, the idea
is to understand what, what are the motivations, how we can incentivize better
the Tor network, how we can grow, the Tor network, basically, or why people are
stopping children relays. So, we are doing this as part of our internship, and Nico
is our intern, and she is doing this work, and we have a survey online, so people can
ask some questions and give feedback about their experience, running relays. And last
month in November, we launched our campaign to get more bridges and in as far
as ... Well, Bridges are very important for users, living in censored countries.
This is how they are going to connect to the Tor network. So, our plan was to have
200 new obfs4 bridges. obfs4 is a pluggable transport that can obfuscate
your Tor connection. And we, ... so the plan was 200 new bridges and the campaign
staffs at now are at 947 new running Bridges. 847 new obfs4 bridges, and the
network size about from 1200 to 2000 new bridges overall. So, the campaign was a
real success and we ... and you can see on the graph here on the screen how the
campaign changed the course of the network size here. And so, this campaign started
in November and December, a situation just happened. So, at the beginning of
December, we received a lot of users asking for support in Russia and what it
was not? Well, we usually have some users asking for help, but this time was
different. We received, like a lot of user support requests, basically emails asking
for Tor bridges, and that was very strange because we didn't know anything happening.
So, we start to investigate with OONI which is the "Open Observatory of Network
Interference" to understand what was happening. So, we start to see some
anomalies on the Tor net in Russia, basically blocking not just our website,
but also the Tor network and not only the Tor network, but also some Tor bridges.
And that was like, ... we started to look into that to understand what was
happening. So, we start to collect information, and we put together (...)
Ticket and a few days later, we received an email from Russian authorities saying
that they were going to block the Torproject domain, and basically, failed
to give us a reason, and we didn't understand what was happening, so we, ...
I'm going to skip the lawyer part and the reason that they are blocking the Tor
project website and I will focus on what they are actually doing and how that is
impacting the Tor network and the Tor community. So, Russia is the second-
largest country of Tor users, after users in the United States, Russia, Germany,
Netherlands and other countries that are the top 10 top 20 countries that are using
Tor. In the end, as we start to look at the metrics and see that the numbers of
our users were decreasing in December. And we also saw that the bridge users also
increasing. So, you can see clearly the impact of the censorship on just a graph
here and just a graph is available on the metrics portal too. So, the summary here
is, well, On December 1st, the Russian authorities they blocked Tor Directory
Authorities. So if you have Tor followed on your computer, you cannot bootstrap
Tor. They block Tor Browser Bridges. So if you have Tor browser installed, you cannot
use these bridges. They also block a domain fronting with Azure. So if you try
to bypass censorship, that was not going to work. They also blocked Snowflake,
which we will talk about a little bit later. And they also blocked a bunch of
Tor bridges in different internet providers. So, it depends on where you are
in Russia, you can use Tor. But in other places, that was going to be more
complicated. And the only way to bypass the censorship at the time on December 1st
was to use a bridge from https://bridges.torproject.org or from our
email. And so, we start to fight the censorship, we launched our Telegram bot
that you can get a bridge and that the bridges is not blocked in Russia. And we
tasked these bridges on all of these points on Russia to see if they are
blocked, if they are blocked we ask for relay operator to hold that IP address.
So, Tor Bridges are working, and we are checking if they are checking in,
recording if they are working. That are community also fought back and that our
committee spin up like more than 400 new Tor bridges in just a few days. I mean, we
have amazing volunteers translating Tor user support guides in Russian, and doing
after the first block on December 1st. The anti-censorship thing also provide a fix
for snowflake, and just fix what's available on Tor browser, the last
release. So, you can see onto the graph that Snowflake was around like less than
2000 users, but after December, you can see it take a while, but then such
increase the number of snowflake users, basically because of Russia. And you can
see just a graph here. There's a decrease here, is because the server crashed after
too many users. So, we fixed the server, and we start to get more users. So, if you
want to help people inside this country, you can run a Tor bridge, or you can run a
snowflake proxy and that that will be very helpful for Tor users in Russia. And a new
update, during Christmas, we also had a new round of censorship in Russia. More
bridges were blocked between December 23 and 24. We are going to reach out to relay
operators, and we are going to contact them and say, OK, you need to rotate your
IP address if you want to get back in the game and fight censorship. And we are
going to do that and just (check) if snowflake is working fine, and we have
been working with doing the other support with Russian users. And we already
answered more than 1300 Help requests since December 1st. Just for comparison,
we resolved 1400 support tickets between January and November. So, in one month, we
already have more user support request from Russia than, you know, in 12 months,
basically. So, uh, so I will do a call here for the international community to
spin up a Tor bridge or run a snowflake proxy. If you can't, if you cannot run a
bridge, you can donate to relay associations. If you cannot donate, you
can help and teach our users about Tor bridges. Or you can help localize Tor in
Russian. Or you can do. We can apply pressure like if you are part of a digital
rights organization or your organization and help us to make pressure on the
Russian government. And stand up and start (a directory) like Edward Snowden did and
publish messages calling the Russian government to stop blocking Tor. How to
get involved. We are available on our IRC and Matrix channels. You can join us, our
mailing list. They are public and you can see what we are talking, and you can help.
You can also join the Tor Forum and you can contribute on GitLab. And for next
year, we are going to improve. We are going to continue to improve our user
support tools for users living in censored countries or regions. So one of our ideas
is to provide a Telegram chat channel, so users can communicate and have and get
user support on Telegram. We are going to continue to develop the Tor relay
gamification project, and continue to organize our trainings in the global
south, in Latin America and Africa, and organize relay operators meetups. Today we
are going to have our relay operator meet- up at 10:00 p.m. German time. And the link
you can find on the Tor relay mailing list. And also, if you search on Twitter,
on social media, you can also find that, um. And today we just covered some topics
from the state of the onion. One month ago, we did a huge presentation like two
and a half hours about anti-censorship from the rising UX SysAdmin team and many
other updates about Arti, about virtual or non deprecation and many other topics. And
you can watch that on YouTube. So, I think that's it from my side, and we are open
for more questions.
Herald: Thank you so much, guys. Like obviously, Tor is a really important
project and that's honestly great to see how dedicated you are to basically helping
everyone. I was actually. Now we're going to go on to the question, and I was
actually wondering something myself before we head over to taking the ones coming in
from the internet. Basically, I as far as I understand like when you working with
bridges and making sure to like, avoid this censorship and everything like as far
as I understand, an important tool in this process are the meek-bridges where you use
huge cloud providers to basically mask traffic to Tor. It's like regular HTTPS
website traffic. Does that not work in the case of Russia or like what does the
attack threat situation look like at the moment? And that's the landscape.
Gus: I can answer in two parts. The first part is that some cloud providers, they
don't like domain fronting. And so, Amazon and others, they change their policy, and
they start to block, well, not just block, but to remove projects that were using
domain fronting. So, the only cloud provider that allows Tor or allow Tor to
do that was Azure, and we had to limit the bandwidth on that. So if you use meek-
Azure on Tor browser, it's going to be very slow. And one thing that we saw, just
as the first part, like the providers, they don't like that they were enforcing
us to stalk, or we will remove just support. The other thing is that the bill,
like the cost of running a meek-Azure bridge or a meek-Amazon bridge, but it
that was too high and too costly. So, snowflake is the next step here because it
uses domain fronting to connect you to a Tor proxy. It's not like proxy, and the
cost will be like very cheap. So, you can get the benefit of domain fronting, and
you can use a lot of proxies to connect Tor users. And that will not cost a lot of
money for the Tor project or for Tor users. So, that is the way to go here is
not to look back, but look forward.*Laugh* Herald: It sounds so cool. Like obviously
it seems that this was very important and actually hearing like some of the problems
that you guys are facing in your fight, I think that's very interesting for all of
us. So questions from the audience. The first one is that the apps that you're
making like the question is, whether they would make you identifiable. So basically,
if exactly those five apps are always calling home over the same Tor nodes, the
question is if that if someone could link that back to you?
Georg: Hmm. Do you want to talk about this Gus? Or should I?
Gus: Go ahead. Georg: Yeah, I think this should not be
the case. I mean, depending on what kind of apps you have, how they are configured
and such and potential, you know, timing signatures and stuff. So, that's one of
the things we're concerned, for instance, with Tor browser and trying to really make
sure to break this up in the sense that folks can't learn anything about those
patterns you have. It's hard, in particular, if adversaries can monitor,
you know, exit nodes or endpoints over a long period of time. But generally, you
should be protected from this kind of threat.
Herald: Right. That makes sense. So, the next question is that if they understand
correctly, the Tor organization is registered in the United States, could the
project be in danger of any government pressure to be discontinued, And have you
guys have a plan to move to more neutral countries like Switzerland or similar?
Gus: So from my point of view, I don't think we suffer any pressure right now
from US government. So, I think. Would what would you be interested? Well, one
thing that is important is one thing is that the Tor project and the other thing
is the Tor network. The Tor Network is,... we have directed authorities in different
countries and that just to avoid this kind of government pressure against the Tor
network. So, I think the question would be more like finding different ways to fund,
..., make Tor sustainable, not just. Like diversifying our funds, so we don't be so
connected with a government, are one source provider of resource. I think just
it's happening right now. Isabella, the executive director, has changing a lot of
our money income. And if you look back in the Tor history, US government was adding
a lot of money through to the TOR project in different by different ways, you know,
like a human rights projects and internet freedom projects. And just was basically
how Tor is and was funded by U.S. government, but not just U.S. government,
other governments like Swedish government too. So, I think I would be more concerned
about the Tor directed authorities being in just one country, and that's not true.
We are in different countries and they so far I don't I never heard any kind of
pressure from the U.S. government against the nonprofit, call it the Tor project.
So, I think that it's basically, my answer here.
Herald: That's good to hear. And now on to maybe a little bit lighter question, do
Tor browser users have any chance or hope to see less captchas in the future?
Georg: Yeah. Yeah. I think we do have some hope, there is, ... I mean, not just only
hope. But we have work ongoing solving this from different angles. The first one
is outreach to major providers trying to understand why they are blocking Tor or
why they provide, captchas and working with them to come up with solutions, which
are not only deployable by them, but by the wider industry. So, there is a
knowledge gap here and then trying to, ..., based on that, trying to figure out
how we can solve this problem. And that's not only from , you know, policy angle,
but we plan to look into technical means as well. For instance. There's the idea of
providing tokens to Tor users, so they can, which they can spend anonymously
at websites, for instance, and the websites can look for that and try to
regulate the traffic, keeping the noisy bots out while providing good service to
our users providing such a token. That's another thing that won't be solved next
year. It's a multi-year project, too. We are a small organization, so there has to
be some kind of prioritization. But that's definitely on our radar and a serious
problem for us. So, we should fix this. Herald: Sounds like great initiatives and
also like that going some of the way in order to some extent legitimize the use of
the Tor browser. Maybe not as much in common society, but also when actually
visiting different websites. Georg: Yeah, exactly.
Herald: Nice. Next up is whether you guys are planning to figure out some kind of
solutions for firewalls, for instance, the corporate ones that are slowing traffic
down. Georg: I know, Gus, do you. Do you have
some, you know, queries or complaints from users for this particular issue? I'm not
sure about that. Gus: Yeah, I and. I just want to be a very
specific question, I .... Herald: It's also very fair to just say
that it's not a problem that you've heard a lot of complaints about,
Georg: Right. Gus: Yeah, sure, that's true. We I didn't
hear about that. Like the captacha one is a popular one, but I never heard.
Georg: I think they're a bunch of larger things to fry here, there. It's not really
in our not even our top 10. So there. Herald: Right? I guess it can also be very
hard for you guys to like, work with figuring out how to prioritize all the
different initiatives and wishes that that people have.
Georg: Yeah, definitely. Herald: Cool. So unfortunately, we don't
have time for any more questions right now, but there is a break-out room that
people can come to, and you will answer any further questions. For now, we are
going to have a break on this channel before the next talk that's going on at
20:00, which is (in German) "Cookiebanner, das Online-Werbe-Ökosystem und Google,
Preisträger BigBrotherAwards 2021" For now, thank you very much, guys. Take care
and maybe we'll see you in the break-out room.
*postroll music*
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