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

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of August 2015

- Published proposal250: "Random Number Generation During Tor Voting" which
  specifies how Tor dirauths can create a fresh random value every day to make
  HSDirs unpredictable (#8244).

  It was posted in the [tor-dev] mailing list:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009189.html
  It received good feedback and we might have to change it some more.

- Designed and published improved algorithms and data structures for entry
  guards, to make the guard system more robust and secure:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009297.html

  It has received lots of good feedback and will also require some more
  tweaking.

- Attented CCC camp. Lots of Tor-related discussions there.

  With David we discussed lots of engineering issues with proposal 250. I did
  some initial refactoring and opened a ticket for the task (#16943)

  I attended the session “Tor Services using GNS” of the Youbroketheinternet
  village. Had interesting discussions with the GNUNet people on how to
  integrate GNS and GNUNet with Tor, which would allow Tor to act as a gateway
  to GNUNet. A proposal needs to be written now.

  Discussed with Jeff about onion addresses and memorability. We discussed about
  using key poems and randomart as a way to defeat phishing and then wrote a
  small [tor-dev] post about this:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-August/009302.html
  The proposal has received fun feedback even though the idea might be a disaster.

  Finally, I talked with some people who do very nice visualizations about various ways
  to make hidden services more acceptable and widely used. Let's see if anything
  will come out of this.

# Activities for September 2015

- I failed to get the guardfraction fix (#16255) ready on the 0.2.7 timeframe,
  so I should get it tested and merged in 0.2.8 this month.

- Need to revise all the guard proposals based on received
  feedback. Specifically, the guard discovery and guard algorithms documents
  need some tweaks.

- Continue work on implementing proposal 250 (#16943).

- We also restarted the SponsorR IRC meetings, so some SponsorR tasks will also
  be done.