[talk] upcoming hackathon proposal: NYC BSD Tor bridges

[George Rosamond]

Most of you are probably familiar with the Tor BSD Diversity Project
(https://torbsd.github.io/). We ported Tor Browser to OpenBSD, conducted
a number of BoFs, presentations and workshops over the years, and have a
positive net impact on Tor land.

The operating system diversity numbers in the Tor network are ugly, and
the more we poke, the uglier it gets. All statistics point to an
overwhelming Linux monoculture, with just under 6% of total public
network bandwidth provided by one BSD variant or another.

These are some of the stats:

https://torbsd.github.io/oostats.html

While public Tor relays have some non-Linux/BSD presence, it's really
disturbing when it comes to bridges. Bridges are non-public entry nodes
for users blocked from the Tor network.

https://torbsd.github.io/oostats/bridges-bw-by-os.txt

Yes... about 99.1% of bridge bandwidth is Linux.

And the absolute numbers reveal more:

https://torbsd.github.io/oostats/bridges-os-count.txt

There's only 31 *BSD bridges.  That's a number we could quickly change
just based on a small portion of people around NYC*BUG and on the talk@
list.

Bridges are easy to run from any residential home network. Bridge IPs
are not publicly listed (as relays are), and the IP will not be
blacklisted. Bridges are purely for entry, and don't push any exit traffic.

Many people in and around NYC on this list have decent bandwidth at
home, whether with one of the cable providers, FIOS, etc. Allowing up to
5 or even 10 megabytes of traffic will have no impact on your home
network, and it's not under consistent usage.

I want to put this workshop together to conduct a hands-on session that
will put another five or ten *BSD bridges into the Tor ecosystem. You
don't need to go an buy some fat 2U Supermicro box that will make ConEd
happy and give you the constant droning of a data center. Any small
system should be fine, whether you have it sitting around or you buy an
APU2, Soekris, RPi, BeagleBone, an old thin client desktop.

Any thoughts on this?  Concerns?

g

Note that by the time of the hackathon, we hope to have obfs4proxy in
both the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports.

https://github.com/torbsd/freebsd-ports

https://github.com/torbsd/openbsd-ports