This status report covers three main points of progress for the Onion Name 
System (OnioNS) project.

1) Since my last report, I opened up this project for beta testing. The server 
logs show that a number of people opened and ran servers for some time, and a 
number of individuals claimed names for their hidden services. S7r was 
extremely helpful in beta testing, we had a very productive private 
conversation on IRC. He helped me identify bugs and several areas of 
improvement. He also reproduced a few show-stopping issues that I had 
considered closed, so I'll be taking care of those as soon as I can. It was a 
thorough test and I very much appreciate the help.

2) I spent a significant amount of time over the last few weeks rewriting my 
design paper. I applied two suggestions that I heard during PETS and the 
Arlington HS meeting: a) to switch from using the consensus for a global source 
of entropy to the new commit-and-reveal proposal, and b) to select members of 
the Quorum (the authoritative set of OnioNS nodes) with selection weight 
proportional to their consensus weight, rather than with even probability. Both 
of these turned out to be excellent ideas. The dirauth commitment protocol is 
far more resistant to attacks than my original scheme and the new Quorum 
selection technique is highly resistant to Sybil attacks. In fact, even if all 
Fast and Stable routers in the lowest 70 percentile by consensus weight are 
malicious, it's still extremely unlikely that a random Quorum selection will 
result in a situation where the attacker wins.

3) There's an upstream change that I forgot to mention in my last report: the 
fact that Tor 0.2.7 now creates and manages Ed25519 keys brings OnioNS one step 
closer towards integration with Tor: my design documents call for OnioNS 
servers to manage Ed25519 signatures. It's a stronger and faster cryptosystem 
than RSA and has much smaller signatures, which reduces the overhead of my data 
structures. Down the road, I should be able to use the online signing key, so I 
won't need to touch the offline identity key.

As we come closer to the end of the Summer of Privacy timeline, I'm going to 
concentrate on addressing the bugs that s7r identified, finish implementing 
some security protocol, and try to move to a fully decentralized setup.

Jesse V.

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