[tor-dev] 3rd status report for OnioNS

[Jesse V]

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Hello everyone,

I have been making significant progress on the Onion Name System project, and it's really coming down the home stretch here.

* I have been focusing on a four-party system: a hidden service operator, an authoritative server, a name server (mirror), and a client. Thus two servers are involved, so the responsibility is split.
* The mirror can now subscribe to the authoritative server for events, thus it receives new Records (claims on domain names) and new signatures on the data structures. The design now prevents the mirror from lying to the client.
* After some discussions with others at PETS, I have split my software into four separate repositories and four different packages: tor-onions-hs, tor-onions-client, tor-onions-server, and tor-onions-common. The first three now have a very focused responsibility and have dependencies on the -common package, a shared library that handles configuration parsing, talking to Tor, and other generic tasks. This also means that hidden service operators need only install the -hs package, which reduces the amount of code running on their protected server.
* I have organized all the tickets on Github into their respective repository and assigned most of them to milestones to indicate how soon I will be tackling them.
* I have also successfully integrated the software into the Tor Browser such that when the Tor Browser starts, Tor and the OnioNS software launch behind the scenes and in the correct order. My modification is a binary substitution rather than recompiling the Tor Launcher, but the result appears to be reliable and greatly simplifies the client end of things.
* In the last status report, I discussed work on logging. I have made significant progress on this task, which is now a critical item because the software now runs in the background when launched from the Tor Browser, so normal stdout is not seen. The software logs to <Tor Browser dir>/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/OnioNS/
* I saw DonnchaC's alpha release. I am really working on making a prototype that everyone can beta test. The packaging and integration into the Tor Browser should make this very straightforward, but I need to have all the configurations in place and a few more bugs worked out before then.

Jesse V.

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