[tor-dev] 4th status report for OnioNS

[Jesse V]

Hello again everyone,

This report covers the period of time that I spent in Washington, DC at the hidden service meetings. I made excellent progress on this project. On the 10th, for example, I pushed nearly 30 commits. I fixed many significant bugs and improved many areas that would make the software easier to understand and to configure.

* Created a separate and fully-fledged manpage for the hidden service, server, and client aspects of the software.
* Client-side and HS-side are now complete and working reliably. The hidden service can generate a Record (a claim on a domain name) and transmit it over a Tor circuit to a remote server. The client now has a binary that launches the Tor executable, the onions-client binary, and a Stem script when the Tor Browser opens, and can now shut them all down properly now.
* Fixed a show-stopping bug that prevented the Stem script from launching automatically with the Tor Browser. (George, this bug was why I had to launch Stem manually when I showed the software to you.) The error thrown for this bug was large and unhelpful, but the fix was amusingly simple: https://github.com/Jesse-V/OnioNS-client/commit/9e80691b02e2a843b26ac21b6b0b88daf6840667
* Many bug fixes and enhancement updates, including some points of confusion.
* Improved flexibility for hosting a server, including the capability to bind to a custom TCP port.
* Finalized event logging and a flag to specify where the log goes. Logs on the client-side now go in an OnioNS folder inside the Tor Browser directory.
* Migrated flag-parsing from the tclap library I found long ago on SourceForge to Unix popt.
* Added a system installation of Tor as a dependency for the hidden service code.
* Minor code cleanup.

Global sources of randomness were also discussed at the hidden service meetings. I need a source of timestamped archivable randomness that the whole network agrees on in order to securely build OnioNS into a distributed system. The global randomness also has implications for the next generation of hidden service protocols, so there was an overall need to get something together. We made good progress towards this goal.

I was able to show Roger and George a demonstration of OnioNS. I registered example.tor and arma.example.tor, pointed example.tor at a HS that I was hosting on my laptop and arma.example.tor at Roger's hidden service (duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion) and uploaded the Record over a Tor circuit to a remote machine, Server A. I then manually transfered the JSON-encoded data structures from Server A to Server B, another machine. Then I launched the Tor Browser (with my binary substitution in place) so that all of the client-side programs were running. I entered "example.tor" into the Tor Browser and as expected arrived at my hidden service, and then typed arma.example.tor into the browser and as expected loaded duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion. This was a great test. The server-to-server communication needs a few bug fixes, but most of that code is in place. As soon as that is complete, I should be about ready for a beta test.

Jesse V.


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