[tor-dev] Damian's Status Report - May 2012

[Damian Johnson]

Hi all. As you may have noticed from the elevated traffic on this list
a few of us are trying to do more development discussions in public.
To that end I'm bucking tradition and sending my monthly status report
here too. They've always been public...
http://www.atagar.com/arm/log.php

... but since their initial emails have been on a closed list I doubt
that most people knew that they existed. On that note, if anyone wants
to hack on fun tor related python stuff then let me know! Stem is
always looking for new people that want to get involved.

========================================

Hi all. Spring is in the air, and with it many lovely things including
the UW Street Fair, Folklife, and an iSec Open Forum. It also included
a week of oncall but that doesn't count in the 'lovely things' column.
On the upside though, this time it was pleasantly light (first time
I've gone a whole week without being woken up by a pager at 3am!).

As a GSoC admin I don't have much to report besides a blog posting at
the start of the month [1]. However, as a mentor some neat things are
in the works...

* Ravi is adding SafeCookie support in stem [2]. I've code reviewed
the first couple iterations and it's looking great. Given some tests
and revising to fit with recent refactoring it should soon be ready to
merge.

After that he'll start working on the general controller. This last
weekend I refactored how response classes are organized and
implemented GETINFO as an example, so this will hopefully be an easy
project for him to start hacking on.

* Beck added descriptor validation to check that the signing key's
hash matches its fingerprint [3]. This is the first part of descriptor
integrity validation that Karsten suggested, however this project has
gotten stuck so he's moving on to other stem tasks.

* Investigated a couple issues brought up by Sathyanarayanan [4][5].

* Two Wesleyan students will start working on stem soon! [6]


Needless to say helping these projects has occupies much of my time,
and will take even more once the Wesleyan students get started.
However, after years of trying in vain to attract developers to my
projects I wouldn't have it any other way. :)

Other stem tasks I finished this month includes...

* ExtraInfo descriptor parsing. This took me a couple weeks since it
contains so many attributes, but I'm glad it's finished. Now all that
remains before we can port Onionoo are the consensus' network status
entries. That's now at the top of my todo list for descriptor work,
but I'm setting that list aside for now in favor of Sphinx and helping
Ravi and Beck with controller work.

* Improved the launch_tor() function, making the test instance easily
configurable via a temporary torrc (similar to what Vidalia does) and
adding integ tests. I also added a workaround so it'll work on Windows
[7][8].

* Updated the stem development wiki [9] so it'll be easier for new
volunteers to find tasks that interest them.

* Discussed descriptor type annotations with Karsten and implemented
stem's side of it [10]. We also discussed some changes to bridge
descriptor sanatization which led to some minor stem changes too.

Cheers! -Damian


[1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/gsoc-2012-projects
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/5262
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/5810
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/5917
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/5918
[6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-May/003547.html
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/5783
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/5493
[9] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/stem
[10] https://trac.torproject.org/5651