BridgeDB is a collection of backend servers used to distribute Tor Bridges. Currently, it mainly consists of a webserver with an HTTPS interface, an email responder, and an SQLite database.
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Tor Bridges are special Tor relays which are not listed in the public relay directory. They are used to help circumvent censorship by providing users with connections to the public relays in the Tor network.
Tor Bridges are different from normal relays in another important way: they can run what are called Pluggable Transports.
A Pluggable Transport is a program which is pluggable — meaning that it is meant to work with lots of other anonymity and censorship circumvention software, not just Tor — and is a transport — meaning that it transports your internet traffic, usually in a way which makes it look different. For example, Obfsproxy is a Pluggable Transport which disguises your traffic by adding an obfuscating layer of encryption.
Well, probably, you don't. But if you're looking for bridges, you can use the web interface of the BridgeDB instance deployed by the Tor Project, which has instructions on getting the Pluggable Transports-capable Tor Browser Bundle, as well as instructions for getting extra Bridges.
If you'd like to hack on BridgeDB, you might wish to read BridgeDB's developer documentation. The rest of this document mainly concerns mainenance and installation instructions.
BridgeDB requires the following OS-level dependencies:
- python>=3
- python3-dev
- python3-dkim (it contains the
dkimverifybinary) - build-essential
- OpenSSL>=1.0.1g
- SQLite3
- MaxMind GeoIP
- libgeoip-dev
- geoip-database
- python-setuptools
- libjpeg-dev
- flog (only required if bridgedb
is invocated with the
run-bridgedbscript)
As well as any Python dependencies in the requirements.txt file.
BridgeDB should work with or without a Python virtualenv.
Install Python 3, and other OS-level dependencies. On Debian, you can do:
sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl python3 python3-dev \ python3-setuptools sqlite3 gnupg2 libgeoip-dev geoip-database
Install Pip 1.3.1 or later. Debian has this version, but if for some reason that or a newer version isn't available, the easiest way to install a newer Pip is to use the Pip development teams's getpip script:
wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py sudo python get-pip.py
(virtualenv installs only) Use Pip to install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper:
sudo pip install --upgrade virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
(virtualenv installs only) Configure virtualenvwrapper and create a virtualenv for BridgeDB:
WORKON_HOME=${HOME}/.virtualenvs export WORKON_HOME mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME source $(which virtualenvwrapper.sh) git clone https://git.torproject.org/bridgedb.git && cd bridgedb mkvirtualenv -a $PWD -r requirements.txt --unzip-setuptools --setuptools bridgedbFrom now on, to use BridgeDB's virtualenv, just do
$ workon bridgedb(after sourcing virtualenvwrapper.sh, as before). To exit the virtualenv without exiting the shell, do$ deactivate.(virtualenv installs only) To install, set PYTHONPATH to include the root directory of the virtualenv:
export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:${VIRTUAL_ENV}/lib/python3.7/site-packagesThen, proceed as usual:
python setup.py install --record installed-files.txt
For general information on the translation process, take a look at our translation guidelines for developers.
Using New Translations:
This should be done when newly completed translations are available in Transifex.
Piece of cake. Running maint/get-completed-translations will take
care of cloning only the bridgedb_completed branch of Tor's
translations repo
and placing all the updated files in their correct locations.
Requesting Translations for Altered/Added Source Code:
This should be done whenever any of the strings requiring translation --
_("the ones inside the weird underscore function, like this") -- are
changed, or new ones are added. See lib/bridgedb/strings.py.
Translations for Tor Project repos are kept in a separate repo. To request new or updated
translations, you'll need to extract the strings from BridgeDB's source code
into our ./i18n/templates/bridgedb.pot template, and then commit it to our
develop branch. From there, the translation system takes over and
eventually, new translations will be available. To extract all strings from
BridgeDB's source, run:
python setup.py extract_messages
Transifex uses the resulting file ./i18n/templates/bridgedb.pot (and this file
only) as input and fetches it from BridgeDB's develop branch, so we don't
need to release a new BridgeDB version (which we only do in the master
branch) to request translations.
Create a self-signed certificate with:
scripts/make-ssl-cert
Or, place an existing certificate in the path specified in bridgedb.conf
by the HTTPS_CERT_FILE option, and a private key where
HTTPS_KEY_FILE points to. The defaults are 'cert' and 'privkey.pem',
respectively.
BridgeDB has two ways to use CAPTCHAs on webpages. The first uses reCaptcha, an external Google service (this requires an account with them), which BridgeDB fetches the CAPTCHAs images from for each incoming request from a client. The second method uses a local cache of pre-made CAPTCHAs, created by scripting Gimp using gimp-captcha. The latter cannot easily be run on headless server, unfortunately, because Gimp requires an X server to be installed.
reCaptcha
To enable fetching CAPTCHAs from the reCaptcha API server, set these options in bridgedb.conf:
RECAPTCHA_ENABLED RECAPTCHA_PUB_KEY RECAPTCHA_SEC_KEY
gimp-captcha
To enable using a local cache of CAPTCHAs, set the following options:
GIMP_CAPTCHA_ENABLED GIMP_CAPTCHA_DIR GIMP_CAPTCHA_HMAC_KEYFILE GIMP_CAPTCHA_RSA_KEYFILE
Uncomment or add COUNTRY_BLOCK_FILE to your bridgedb.conf. This file
should contain one bridge entry per line, in the format:
fingerprint <bridge fingerprint> country-code <country code>
If the COUNTRY_BLOCK_FILE file is present, bridgedb will filter
blocked bridges from the responses it gives to clients requesting
bridges.
Before running to any of BridgeDB's test suites, make sure you have the
additional dependencies in the Pip requirements file,
.test.requirements.txt installed:
pip install -r .test.requirements.txt
To create a bunch of fake bridge descriptors to test BridgeDB, do:
bridgedb mock [-n NUMBER_OF_DESCRIPTORS]
To run the test suites, do:
make coverage
If you just want to run the tests, and don't care about code coverage
statistics, see the bridgedb trial and bridgedb test commands.
To run BridgeDB, simply make any necessary changes to bridgedb.conf, and do:
bridgedb
And remember that all files/directories in bridgedb.conf are assumed
relative to the runtime directory. By default, BridgeDB uses the current
working directory; you can, however specify an a different runtime
directory:
bridgedb -r /srv/bridges.torproject.org/run
Make sure that the files and directories referred to in bridgedb.conf exist. However, many of them, if not found, will be touched on disk so that attempts to read/write from/to them will not raise excessive errors.
When you have new lists of bridges from the Bridge Authority, replace the old files and do:
kill -s SIGHUP `cat .../run/bridgedb.pid`
Obviously, you'll have to feed it bridge descriptor files from a BridgeAuthority. There's currently only one BridgeAuthority in the entire world, but Tor Project is, of course, very interested in adding support for multiple BridgeAuthorities so that we can scale our own network, and make it easier for individual and organisations who wish to run a lot of Tor bridge relays have an easier time distributing those bridges themselves (if they wish to do so). If you'd like to fund our work on this, please contact tor-dev@lists.torproject.org!
Just connect to the appropriate port. (See the HTTPS_PORT and
HTTP_UNENCRYPTED_PORT options in the bridgedb.conf file.)
The HTTPS interface for our BridgeDB instance can be found here.
Any mail sent to the EMAIL_PORT with a destination username as defined by
the EMAIL_USERNAME configuration option (the default is 'bridge', e.g.
bridges@...) and sent from an @riseup.net or @gmail.com address (by
default, but configurable with the EMAIL_DOMAINS option).
You can email our BridgeDB instance here.
Moat is a bridge distributor for requesting bridges through Tor Launcher's user interface.
The following describes the Moat API, version 0.1.0.
The client and server both MUST conform to JSON-API.
The client SHOULD direct all requests via the Meek reflector at MEEK_REFECTOR.
..
XXX meek reflector URL
The client MUST send a POST /moat/fetch containing the following JSON:
{
"data": [{
"version": "0.1.0",
"type": "client-transports",
"supported": [ "TRANSPORT", "TRANSPORT", ... ],
}]
}
where:
TRANSPORTis a string identifying a transport, e.g."obfs3"or"obfs4". Currently supported transport identifiers are: -"vanilla"-"fte"-"obfs3"-"obfs4"-"scramblesuit"
The moat server will respond with 200 OK.
If there is an overlap with what BridgeDB supports, the moat server will select the "best" transport from the list of supported transports, and respond with the following JSON containing a CAPTCHA challenge:
{
"data": [{
"id": "1",
"type": "moat-challenge",
"version": "0.1.0",
"transport": "TRANSPORT",
"image": "CAPTCHA",
"challenge": "CHALLENGE",
}]
}
where:
TRANSPORTis the agreed upon transport which will be distributed,CAPTCHAis a base64-encoded, jpeg image that is 400 pixels in length and 125 pixels in height,CHALLENGEis a base64-encoded CAPTCHA challenge which MUST be later passed back to the server along with the proposed solution.
The challenge contains an encrypted-then-HMACed timestamp, and solutions submitted more than 30 minutes after requesting the CAPTCHA are considered invalid.
If there is no overlap with the transports which BridgeDB supports, the moat server will respond with the list of transports which is does support:
{
"data": [{
"id": "1",
"type": "moat-challenge",
"version": "0.1.0",
"transport": [ "TRANSPORT", "TRANSPORT", ... ],
"image": "CAPTCHA",
"challenge": "CHALLENGE",
}]
}
To propose a solution to a CAPTCHA, the client MUST send a request for POST
/moat/check, where the body of the request contains the following JSON:
{
"data": [{
"id": "2",
"type": "moat-solution",
"version": "0.1.0",
"transport": "TRANSPORT",
"challenge": "CHALLENGE",
"solution": "SOLUTION",
"qrcode": "BOOLEAN",
}]
}
where:
TRANSPORTis the agreed upon transport which will be distributed,CHALLENGEis a base64-encoded CAPTCHA challenge which MUST be later passed back to the server along with the proposed solution.SOLUTIONis a valid unicode string, up to 20 bytes in length, containing the client's answer (i.e. what characters the CAPTCHA image displayed). The solution is not case-sensitive.BOOLEANis"true"if the client wants a qrcode containing the bridge lines to be generated and returned;"false"otherwise.
If the CHALLENGE has already timed out, or if the SOLUTION was
incorrect, the server SHOULD respond with 419 No You're A Teapot.
If the SOLUTION was successful for the supplied CHALLENGE, the
server responds 200 OK with the following JSON:
{
"data": [{
"id": "3",
"type": "moat-bridges",
"version": "0.1.0",
"bridges": [ "BRIDGE_LINE", ... ],
"qrcode": "QRCODE",
}]
}
where:
BRIDGE_LINEis a bridge line suitable for configuration in a torrc,QRCODEis a base64-encoded jpeg image of a QRCode containing all theBRIDGE_LINE, if one was requested, otherwise this field will beNaN.
If the SOLUTION was successful for the supplied CHALLENGE, but the
server is unable to distribute the requested Bridges, the server responds 200
OK with the following JSON:
{
"errors": [{
"id": "6",
"type": "moat-bridges",
"version": "0.1.0",
"code": "404",
"status": "Not Found",
"detail": "DETAILS",
}]
}
where:
DETAILSis some string describing the detailed nature of the issue.
If the client requested some page other than /moat/fetch, or
/moat/check, the server MUST respond with 501 Not Implemented.
If the client attempts any other HTTP method, other than POST, the server
MUST respond 403 FORBIDDEN.
Send your questions, patches, and suggestions to the tor-dev mailing list, or to Philipp Winter.