[atlas] Protocol/Technology testing?

Yes, there certainly are countries that block certain protocols!

See here https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ - there's even a recent post on
Iran. However, Iran is far from the only offender.


-----Original Message-----
From: ripe-atlas-bounces at ripe.net [mailto:ripe-atlas-bounces at ripe.net] On
Behalf Of Philip Homburg
Sent: Monday, 13 February 2012 21:07
To: ripe-atlas at ripe.net
Subject: Re: [atlas] Protocol/Technology testing?

On 2/12/12 7:00 , Daniel AJ Sokolov wrote:
>
> Are there any plans to extend the Atlas probe's functionality from 
> simple Pings to more sophisticated testing?
>
At the moment, probes do pings, traceroutes and DNS queries.
> For example:
> Can actual payloads be transferred (http, ftp, SMTP, NNTP etc.) and 
> with which parameters?
There is support in the probe firmware for doing more, but it is not enabled
in User Defined Measurements. For http it is an open issue whether that is
safe. We haven't really thought about ftp, smtp, nttp.
> Is encryption available (https, ssh, starttls, etc.)?
>
Probes use ssh to connect to the Atlas infrastructure, but there are no 
measurements that try to set up an encrypted channel.

> Some countries and/or ISPs restrict what users can do.
>
> Currently, Iran is inhibiting all encrypted international connection. 
> For the users on the ground this is horrible - no gmail, no yahoo, no 
> online banking, no Tor network - no proivacy!
>
> Yet on the Atlas network everything seems to be fine, as pings still 
> work. (However, only one of the six probes is online, the rest has 
> been offline for weeks. And the one that is online was offline for 
> weeks until a few days ago. I'm not sure what the issue is there.)
>
Atlas is not fine. Last time I looked (early this year), all probes in 
Iran were unable to connect to the infrastructure. They can do 
measurements, but they cannot report their results over ssh. I'm amazed 
that one is now connected again.
> It would be good to know if some protocols are not available in a 
> certain jurisdiction. Of course, such tests could be done at a much 
> lower rate than Pings - some maybe every hour, others every couple of 
> hours.
>
Are there more countries than Iran that have this issue? (We implicitly 
measure ssh, and that doesn't seem to an issue except in Iran)