Expand OONI’s testing model to support richer testing input

bassosimone commented 1 year ago

This epic issue is about expanding OONI's testing model to support richer testing input. The general idea is that using an URL as input has served us well but now it has become a bottleneck to implement specific kind of experiments. For example, currently we cannot express that we want to measure a URL using HTTP/3. Likewise, we cannot include good IP addresses for the URL's domain.

Here's a breakdown of the milestones based on a presentation I delivered in the 2023 @ooni/ooni-team meeting, with subsequent integrations as we continued to evolve our planning.

stateDiagram-v2
  state "M0 (@bassosimone)" as M0
  state "M1 (@bassosimone)" as M1
  state "M2 (@bassosimone)" as M2
  state "M3 (@bassosimone)" as M3
  state "M4.1 (@bassosimone)" as M4_1
  state "M4.2 (@aanorbel)" as M4_2
  state "M5 (@hellais)" as M5
  state "M6 (@majakomel)" as M6
  M0 --> M1
  M1 --> M2
  M1 --> M3
  M1 --> M4_1
  M4_1 --> M4_2
  M2 --> M5
  M5 --> M6

Here are the issues for each milestone:

M0. preconditions for implementing richer input

[x] https://github.com/ooni/probe/issues/2379

M1. richer-input microservices

M2. miniooni uses richer input

M3. ooniprobe uses richer input

M4.1 oonimkall uses richer input

[ ] ???

M4.2 ooni/probe-mobile uses richer input

[ ] ???

M5. ooni/data powered analysis

[x] ooni/data: support for processing signal results: no action needed, we're already good;
[x] ooni/data: support for processing stun_reachability results: no action needed, we're already good;
[ ] ooni/data: support for processing dnscheck: need to support HTTP/3 measurements;
[x] https://github.com/ooni/data/issues/35
[ ] https://github.com/ooni/data/issues/36

M6. ooni/explorer work

[ ] https://github.com/ooni/explorer/issues/870

Because this is an epic issue, we will create child issues as needed.

agrabeli commented 1 year ago

For more context, this is what is written in our DRL proposal:

We aim to expand OONI’s testing model to support richer testing input and, by extension, enable all OONI Probe app users worldwide to more easily run novel experiments, automatically process these measurements and present findings on OONI Explorer as open data. This involves making improvements to the communication layer between the measurement coordination infrastructure and probes to improve our ability to provide a richer set of configuration parameters to network experiments that goes beyond just providing them with URLs to test.

Specifically, this involves making all the components of the OONI ecosystem (the backend API, OONI Probe clients, the data processing pipeline, the database model, and OONI Explorer) aware that the input for a measurement is now an object containing a URL, as well as other configuration parameters (for example, the backend would aggregate measurements based on a richer definition of input to score HTTP/2 measurements differently than HTTP/3 measurements).

To this end, this may entail:

Changes to the backend API to serve richer testing input to probes;
Changes to OONI Probe’s API to pass the rich input object to experiments;
Changes to the data processing pipeline to use the richer input model to group and score measurements;
Changes to the database model to use the richer definition of input for the indexing of measurements;
Adding support to OONI Explorer for querying measurements with richer input and displaying the full input (instead of just measured URLs).

This work is a requirement for expanding our censorship measurement capabilities, and will enable us to ship a new methodology for measuring throttling. For example, if we suspect that access to https://twitter.com is being throttled in Russia, we could serve richer input (including a boolean flag) to OONI Probe clients in Russia to perform additional measurements that are useful for detecting throttling. In such a case, for example, the probe would fetch the whole page (as opposed to fetching a small part of the webpage) and would collect and submit download speed measurements to OONI’s backend.

agrabeli commented 1 year ago

I have set a tentative timeline on zenhub which probably needs to be adjusted.

bassosimone commented 1 year ago

As explained in https://github.com/ooni/2023-05-richer-input/commit/7871d3ba57a8824f948167499c0534646db8dda0, the https://github.com/ooni/2023-05-richer-input contains a prototype that explores the richer input domain and redesigns ooniprobe around richer input.

ooni / ooni.org

Expand OONI’s testing model to support richer testing input #1291