Remedy

Relay Monitoring and Deployment Platform

Warnings

This is the first release and is not well documented or tested. Don't hesitate to submit issues on the github tracker!

Remedy hasn't been designed or reviewed for operations in risky environments, please deploy responsibly. We will probably implement everything on top of Tor Hidden Services at some point.

Let us know on the tracker if you have suggestions!

What is Remedy

Overview

Remedy is a platform which helps in managing relay nodes (primarily reverse proxy nodes) that provide access to blocked content in a cyber-censored environment.

Features

Remedy is designed to facilitate :

• Monitoring of performance & traffic on relay nodes
• Visualize traffic of relays based on the dissemination channel that were used to publicise their existence
• Monitoring of in-country health status for each relay node
• Detecting in a timely manner any blocking event on each node & which blocking technique is used
• Mitigate any blocking event automatically by automating the deployment and configuration of relay nodes.

The platform

Remedy is designed in 4 components :

• Performance & traffic monitoring component for relay nodes
• Health monitoring system for nodes for censorship status monitoring
• Automated blockage mitigation & deployment features for existing & new nodes
• Monitoring dashboard for the visualisation and interactions with the three components above

The technology

Remedy is powered by the following technologies.

• The performance & health monitoring status data collection is built on Collectd.
• The dashboard frontend is built using Drupal 7, one of the leading Content Management Framework
• Also, the mitigation process logic is implemented using Rules Drupal module, meaning they can be reconfigured without coding
• Relay nodes can be:
  • Nginx reverse proxies
  • OpenVPN/Obfsproxy servers
  • (soon) Web mirrors
  • (soon) Tor bridges
• Relays are deployed on Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, which allows a very quick & automated deployment, but will evolve to support more cloud providers (particularly OpenStack)

Dependencies

• PHP/MySQL
• Drupal 7.x
• RRD
• Collectd
• AWS EC2 + AWS SDK for PHP - http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforphp/
• DNSSimple + DNS Simple PHP Lib - https://github.com/fvdm/dnsimple-php

Installation

###Drupal Cf docs/INSTALL.md

##Directory structure Apart from docs, the directories contain configuration elements to be installed on the dashboard server:

• drupal contains the drupal installation
• oonib contains the OONI backend configuration for the dashboard
• salt contains Salt master-side configuration for both probes and relays