On Thu, 23 Jul 2015 23:46:26 +0000 Jacob Appelbaum jacob@appelbaum.net wrote:
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Do users know that their router's implementation of NAT-PMP/uPnP is shit?
Who knows better than the user? And who better than the user to take an action and to learn it?
At this point with all the resources available, I will guess that if the user needs something like tor-fw-helper, they probably have no idea what router firmware is.
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I don't even understand why this is part of the discussion? Why is this our problem? Or put differently - sure, people don't patch their stuff - are we really making the problem worse? Wouldn't it make them more likely to interact with their router and perhaps apply patches to it?
Dunno. Considering there was a bunch of fuss in the media about "you should disable UPnP to increase security" a while ago, we could be making things worse.
Eg: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/01/29/disable-a-protocol-call...
And again, no. If they need tor-fw-helper, I doubt they know what firmware is in the first place.
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If they think they can/want to support this sort of thing, then they can say so, and I'll do the integration work on the Tor Browser side, and write the required flashproxy changes to make it work for more than ~2 hours when using NAT-PMP.
That seems awesome - I guess I'd ask - does it need to be on by default? I'm not actually advocating for using it by default - I am advocating for shipping some NAT punching tool that can be used at all. tor-fw-helper never shipped as compiled code to end users which I found to be extremely demotivating.
For flashproxy to work, yes, it would need to be on since flashproxy currently requires NAT traversal. WebRTC will also fix this, but a version of flashproxy that uses WebRTC does not exist yet.
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Any user that can compile a Go program can probably just do the NAT punching on their own anyway...
$ go get github.com/yawning/tor-fw-helper $ $GOPATH/bin/tor-fw-helper
I can't tell if you're agreeing with me here or if you are suggesting that people who have trouble configuring a program to use to a SOCKS proxy will be able to build and use a commandline tool. I assure you - nearly anyone who can use `go get` will be able to configure their NAT manually. For everyone else, we need some usable automation.
A bit of both. In my opinion, people that can't setup port forwarding by hand shouldn't be running a Tor relay in the first place.
There are no dependencies beyond what is provided by the Go compiler, so it's the easiest thing to package ever. If someone wants to package binaries for it, I don't care. I'll even add a manpage for it once the upstream git repo is move to git.torproject.org, tag/sign releases, and keep tarballs around if that's what people want.
Seems reasonable. I had hoped it would be part of the default Tor build process - so anyone with a Tor can be a NAT punching relay or bridge or pluggable transport. We were very close to this with tor-fw-helper but never flipped the switch. It would be pretty sad if we went even further away from this much needed ability. I guess that is the direction of travel though. :(
However, if it breaks, my response will be "patches accepted" for all but the most trivial bugs since it's not realistic for me to own every single router ever made. And more importantly, compromised routers due to shitty/out of date uPnP implementations are Not My Problem.
If we shipped it, I'd say we're still improving on nearly every front over the C tor-fw-helper situation.
If that's what people want to do. They should let me know so I sign/tag releases and add the documentation. Unless someone from the support people tells me they're ok with dealing with supporting users when this fails, I won't do the flashproxy work, but someone else is more than welcome to do it.
Regards,