[tor-reports] SponsorR July 2015 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the July 2015 report for SponsorR:

- In the beginning of July, we gathered in Washington, DC for a
  hackfest focused on hidden services. We did lots of work and wrote a
  blog post about it:
   https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-service-hackfest-arlington-accords

- As part of the hackfest we worked on the various codebase changes
  that we need to implement proposal 224. We also analyzed and
  documented how the data structures should be refactored for the next
  generation hidden services project.
   https://people.torproject.org/~asn/hs_hackfest_2015/224modules.txt
   https://people.torproject.org/~dgoulet/hs224-refactor.txt

- We also published a report on the introduction point stability
  statistics we collected during the past months. You can find it
  here: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-July/009109.html

- As part of improving and understanding reliability of introduction
  points, we implemented ticket #4862. As part of that ticket, we
  disabled the dynamic introduction point formulat that leaked the
  popularity of busy hidden services.  We also implemented #8239 which
  allows hidden services to reconnect to old introduction points,
  which should improve the reliability and stability of hidden
  service.

- We further discussed hidden service statistics and how the original
  hidden service statistics we implemented 6 months ago have been very
  very useful:
  https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-statistics-about-onions

  To improve the reliability of the statistics (since currently only
  about 3% of the network reports them), we decided to enable them by
  default in the future (#15254). We also discussed systems for
  collecting additional statistics in a privacy-preserving manner,
  using Secure Multiparty Computation or other similar techniques.

- We also took our old design for "Direct Onion Services" and revised
  it into a faster and far more elegant protocol. These types of
  services trade service-side location privacy for improved
  performance, reliability, and scalability. They will allow sites
  like reddit to offer their services faster on hidden services while
  respecting their clients anonymity. During the last days of the
  hackfest, we wrote a draft proposal for this new design:
   https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/special/torspec.git/log/?h=xxx-direct-onion


- Further work was done on onionbalance, the hidden service load
  balancer. An alpha version of the software was released:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-July/038312.html
  and volunteers have already been testing it in their services:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-July/038314.html

- We did more development on OnioNS, the Onion Name System, which
  allows a hidden service operator to register a human memorable name
  (e.g. example.tor) that can be used instead of the regular onion
  address. In the last days of the hackfest we prepared a
  proof-of-concept demo wherein a domain name was registered and then
  the Tor Browser successfully loaded a hidden service under that
  name. That was a significant step for the project:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-July/009103.html

- Further hidden service control commands were added. Ticket #14846
  implements a control port command that allows hidden service
  operators to easily fetch the descriptor of their service.1