iCepa

iCepa is an iOS system-wide VPN Tor client. It uses Tor.framework to manage its Tor instance, and tun2tor to bridge VPN traffic to Tor.

The project is in progress, and currently alpha-quality.

Requirements

• iOS 10 or later

• Xcode 8 or later

• Rust

• Carthage

• Homebrew or MacPorts (optional but no fun without)

• An iOS device (Simulator will not work, due to lack of support of Network Extensions!)

• A paid Apple Developer account (The free account is not enough for the Network Extension!)

Prepare signing

• You need to pick 3 unique identifiers. (as in: unique in the whole App Store!) Follow the pattern as per the examples:

  1. A bundle ID (com.example.iCepa)
  2. An extension bundle ID (com.example.iCepa.extension)
  3. A group ID (group.com.example.iCepa)

• Before ever touching the project configuration, update iCepa-iOS.xcconfig with these. Xcode will mess up your configuration, otherwise.

• Automatic signing will not work, instead it requires some manual set up in Apple's developer portal:

  1. Use your unique bundle ID (com.example.iCepa) and generate an App ID for it.
  2. Use your unique extension bundle ID (com.example.iCepa.extension), and generate an App ID for that, too.
  3. Create an App Group (group.com.example.iCepa), and enable that App Group on both of the App IDs that you just created.
  4. Check the Network Extensions checkbox on both of the App IDs.
  5. Create two new development Provisioning Profiles, one for each App ID.

• Load the provisioning profiles into Xcode using Xcode -> Preferences -> Accounts -> [Your Apple-ID] -> Download All Profiles

Building

1. Acquire both dependencies using Git:

   git submodule update --init --recursive
   

2. Because the network extension depends on tun2tor, you will need Rust installed. You can install it using rustup:

   curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
   

   or using Homebrew:

   brew install rustup-init
   rustup-init
   

   then, in both cases:

   rustup install stable
   rustup target add aarch64-apple-ios
   rustup target add armv7-apple-ios
   

   If set up correctly tun2tor will be built during Xcode's app build. (There's a script tun2tor.sh contained doing that, which is hooked into the Xcode build process.)

   Since you will need the cross-compilation features of Rust, don't bother trying to install Rust directly from Homebrew: You won't be able to install additional architecture targets.

3. iCepa also depends on Tor.framework, which you have to build once using Carthage:

   brew install automake autoconf libtool gettext carthage
   carthage build --platform iOS
   

4. iCepa should now build normally from Xcode. If it does not, please file an issue! iCepa does not work in the iOS Simulator.

Contributing

iCepa is separated into two components:

• The UI is written in Swift, and provides a basic interface to start, stop and configure the Tor network extension.
• The network extension itself is also written in Swift, and bridges traffic to Tor using an NEPacketTunnelProvider and tun2tor. An NEPacketTunnelProvider is analogous to a utun (userspace network tunnel) interface.

Tor.framework is used to communicate with and start the tor instance from both the app and the extension.

Things that need work:

• tun2tor.
• The UI. The main focus is the control screen which will have controls to start/stop and information about the connection. Taking mockups/pull requests for either! Create Github issues for now.
• There is no icon or any branding (the name is not even final).