[tor-dev] GSoC 2017 - Questions

[Krishna Shukla]

Hey,

I'm Krishna Shukla, I'm studying a bachelors of computer science at the University of Queensland.
I guess the relevant subjects I've studied so far covers C and Unix programming, Computer Networks, Algorithms and Data Structures, and Programming in the large. (got a high distinction in all the above)

My most important question is if I could work on a project but not actually be apart of GSoC? - I am unfortunately ineligible as my brother works as a Security Engineer at Google Sydney. And if the above is okay would it also be okay to not have to strictly abide by their timeline as I don't actually have holidays during this time in Australia but I'd like to contribute in my free time nonetheless!

As for projects themselves I'm really interested in the relay crypto parallelism and the hidden service crypto parallelism. And I have a couple of questions regarding them.

For the relay crypto parallelism I wanted to know what is there left to be done? When I looked at the tickey #1749 someone called towelenee made a few patches that already made it multi threaded, were these changes just not accepted? Also wanted to know if specific knowledge about circuit cryptography was required? As I know of it, but I certainly cannot make my own fully homomorphic cryptosystem, is it more in the steps of the system has already been made, it just needs to be parallelised correctly?

It also states the code is written to expect immediate responses, I'm not sure what you mean by that, after all there is always a slight delay, and if it becomes multi threaded we can never know what is running what when, so is it more someone is waiting at the other end of a socket and needs it ASAP, or is it internally things want the answer quickly (in which case I don't know how to solve it other than uses mutexes which is probably not so okay)?

I am interested in the hidden service crypto parallelism in its own right, but I was also thinking weather it would be a feasible idea to combine the two projects and create a multi-threaded decryption library that could be linked to both the tor relay and the hidden services (could release it as a cryptosystem library, all the fully homorphic cryptosystem libraries I found used GPL licenses and thus not compatible with tors), or are their requirements too far apart?

Also I was wondering how the Ahmia automated blacklisting was planned to work? As in how would a list of child abuse sites be fetched? Honestly I don't actually know python, I've worked with it and Django before in a hackathon once, but I cannot claim any real knowledge in it, but at the same time I am passionate about the topic of child abuse, and I think if I can help reduce its demand in anyway by making it harder to find, I'd say it's some good added to the world.

Apologies about the long mail guys,
Krishna Shukla
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