[tor-reports] George's status report: September 2015

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of September 2015

- I attended the tor dev meeting in Berlin. It was quite fruitful and
  we moved forward on various projects. My TODO list has also expanded
  accordingly.

  We spent plenty of time roadmapping the following months: 
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/meetings/2015SummerDevMeeting/Roadmap/HiddenServices

  We discussed various aspects of guard security and circuit fingerprinting:
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/mikeperry/torspec.git/commit/?h=guard_discovery_dev
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009632.html

  With Jeff we discussed his proposals on integrating GNS with Tor:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-September/009560.html
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-September/009591.html

  I helped write a blog post about the public hackfest day:
    https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-open-hack-day-berlin-everyone

- I worked on implementing the shared randomness proposal with dgoulet.

  I mainly worked on the voting logic of the proposal and I managed to
  get a basic version of the protocol running on chutney!
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/16943

# Activities for October 2015

- I plan to continue implementing the shared randomness proposal (#16943).

  There are still tons of things to do but we are doing steady progress.

  I think the next step here is not related to proposal 250, but it
  seems to be a necessary requirement. We need to have dirauths
  generate a new ed25519 shared-randomness-specific signing key that
  is used to sign protocol messages. We need to certify this new SR
  key with the dirauth's signing key, and then certify the signing key
  with the identity key.  A proposal will need to be written and the
  vote documents will need to be modified accordingly.

- I'm planning to take another look at the "Enable HS stats by
  default" ticket since it seems that some people are not happy with
  the current decision.

- Need to think more about developing ethical research guidelines for
  Tor/anonymity research. We did a start during the dev meeting that
  can be found here:  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ResearchEthics
  Subsequent discussion can be found here:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009620.html
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009639.html

- Need to handle all the feedback from the guard proposals and fold in
  the discussions from the dev meeting:
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/mikeperry/torspec.git/commit/?h=guard_discovery_dev
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-October/009632.html
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-September/009497.html
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-September/009406.html
  Seems like the design stage here is still not over :(

  Also, we have some ideas on moving forward on the circuit
  fingerprinting front that we should explore.

- I'm considering starting a hidden-service spin-off of the Patch
  Workshop IRC event. The idea is that we meet every 2 weeks or so on
  IRC, and work together on reviewing patches and addressing
  tickets. This could also include community applications as well. I
  think we would get a crowd for that.

  Need to find the right time and send an email.

- I'm also hoping to write a small blog post with Katie about the dev
  meeting in Berlin. It was good fun, and we can easily sketch a 2
  paragraph summary full of links and resources, as well as some
  photographs of the notes and post-its. I think people would enjoy
  such a blog post.