[tor-dev] Getting people started on guard selection algorithms [prop259]

[George Kadianakis]

Hello Nick, isis and Mike!

It seems like some Thoughtworks folks (from here on referred to as FRITO [0])
are interested in helping us with Tor hidden services development for 4 weeks
or so. They start early next week! :)

They were looking for a coding project that is tractable within a month given a
team of four people. Also, it should be fun, interesting and be related to
hidden services.

One of the projects we discussed and found potentially fitting was proposal 259:
 https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/259-guard-selection.txt

It is my undertanding that the next steps here involve implementing the various
proposed algorithms and evaluating how they cope in some simulated
scenarios. Nick and Isis started working on this in Python here:
    https://github.com/isislovecruft/guardsim
You can find the scenarios that need to be tested here:
    https://github.com/isislovecruft/guardsim/blob/master/doc/stuff-to-test.txt

This project seems quite suitable for the FRITO crew :)

The idea here is that after we decide which one is the best algorithm to use,
we would implement it for little-t-tor in C. The best algorithm is the one that
achieves the greatest reachability and security tradeoff. The algorithm should
also be designed in such a way that fits into the tor asynchronous networking
API.  It would be amazing if FRITO could help us here as well, but maybe we can
start up with the Python simulation and see if they like the project!

Isis and Nick, are you currently working on the guardsim code? Would you be OK
if it was taken over by FRITO? Any advice for them?

Also, is there a ticket we should be using for this project? If not, I will
make one ASAP.

Cheers!

[0]: FRITO is derived from their names: Fan, Reinaldo, Ivan, Tania and Ola. 
     They are all CCed.

PS: We recently did a reading group about prop259 and a few other proposals that
    you might find interesting. The minutes can be found here:
      https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010265.html
    and the raw logs here:
      http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-dev/2016/tor-dev.2016-01-19-16.03.log.html