[tor-dev] Arti report 7: September 30 through October 13

[Nick Mathewson]

# Arti Report 7: September 30 through October 13

## Guards are working!

Finally, at long last, we've got Guard nodes working in Arti!

When we first made our roadmap, we set our first milestone as "Arti
has all the features necessary for basic anonymity."  Now that
Guards are implemented, all of those features are done!

Does this mean that Arti is now production-ready for anonymous use?
No, not yet.  Just because we no longer have _missing_ privacy
features doesn't mean that those privacy features are actually
implemented correctly.  We'll need a lot more testing, debugging,
and experimentation.  Also, it's very possible we've forgotten
something.  We'll need careful auditing to be sure.

### Interesting guard issues

There are more issues to fix and features to add to the guard
implementation down the road.  For a current list, have a look at
[this comment](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/58#note_2754904),
which lists them.

## What's next

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be working on smaller issues,
bugfixes, and miscellaneous cleanups for an upcoming "0.0.1"
release, targeting November 1.

You can see our latest progress
[here]((https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/milestones/6).

## Thanks!

Thanks to Jani Monoses for progress towards a WASM port, and Trinity
Pointard for updates to dependencies.