[tor-dev] Suggestions for Arti Example Programs

[Saksham Mittal]

Hello there!

I was recently selected as a GSoC contributor to help improve Arti by
providing example utilities to test drive the APIs.

I've come up with a couple ideas in my GSoC proposal and I wanted to
share them as well as ask the community if they had any ideas of what
projects they may want to see included in examples to help developers
use Arti APIs in the future.

1. A download manager in Rust which will download the Tor Browser Bundle
through a bridge connection.

2. A simple DNS lookup tool like dig which uses Tor relay to resolve
hostnames anonymously, reducing the need to trust a DNS server. (This
will use DNS over TLS)

3. A small script to just print out the current connection info on the
circuit that had been chosen (like in Tor Browser) and to test relay and
bridge connectivity at the user’s end for diagnostic purposes.

4. A bridge reachability monitor using Arti. This tool would hold
connections to many obfs4 bridges open and detect when one of them goes
down. (More info about this can be found at
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/issues/717)

5. A small proxy server and client which uses just the pluggable
transport code to create obfuscated connection between the two (doesn't
go through the Tor network, it is just intended to showcase how to setup
connections through PTs)


I'd be happy to know of any cool ideas you may have to build with Arti
that I could work on this summer!

Thanks!

-Saksham