During last week's meeting we had a conversation on the future of Pluggable Transports. Our current pt protocol[0] have many limitations, the two main ones are: * We have to do hacks to do things like passing arguments, and they come with many problems[1] * There are not many SOCKS server implementations and many PTs end up needing to implement their own (goptlib and proteus have done it)
We have being wondering if making a change from SOCKS to a HTTP based protocol is the solution we need[2].
For mobile phones we will need PTs to be implemented as libraries, and some projects like IPtProxy[3] have being created to work around that limitation. It looks like we will want anyway a future were arti has PT plugins and PTs are integrated in arti. We might want to extend that idea to implement all the connect assist workflow there, so clients that use arti don't need to implement all the logic themselves again and again.
With that future of PTs as plugins. Do we still need a inter-process PT protocol? and need to make a new version of the pt-spec[0]? Or should we ditch it and start working on what will that plugin API/ABI look like and how PTs will be integrated there?
It looks like this conversation doesn't fit well in our irc weekly meetings, let's have a voice meeting to discuss this. I have created a poll to see what date next week will work better for all of us: https://www.systemli.org/poll/#/poll/YRRF8K19Bq/participation?encryptionKey=...
[0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/pt-spec.txt [1] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/104 [2] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/team/-/issues/130 [3] https://github.com/tladesignz/IPtProxy