# Activities of August 2014 - During August I mainly worked on the guardiness part of prop 236 (section 1.3). That's ticket #9321 and it's the major blocker that needs to be solved if we ever want to increase the guard lifetime period (more on this later).
To this end, I have written a Python script that calculates the guard fraction of guards given a set of consensuses. I have published it here and it's ready for review: https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/asn/hax.git/shortlog/refs/heads/guardiness That script is supposed to be run by the directority authorities, as described here: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9321#comment:22 The deployment process involves a cron'ed script that summarizes consensuses to summary files, and another cron'ed script that reads those summary files to calculate the guard fraction of guards. Then little-t-tor reads the results of the second script. Rather iffy, eh? I suspect deployment is going to be trickier than it seems, and I need to think of a few ways to make it easier and more failsafe. On the little-t-tor side, I have written some PoC code that implements GuardFraction voting by authorities, and I have also implemented the consensus GuardFraction parsing by clients. I have been testing voting/parsing in a local test network and it seems to work. Next step is to make clients consider GuardFraction during path selection. And then unittests. And then making sure that our deployment strategy is actually doable. Sebastian and Nick has commented on the deployment strategy and they found it workable... I also wrote a torspec patch for proposal 236 to further specify how authorities should vote on GuardFraction: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007439.html Another existential question here, is whether we actually want to increase the guard lifetime period. Originally, proposal 236 suggested extending guard lifetime to 9 months. It's still unclear whether this is a good idea. If we don't plan to extend the lifetime period of guards any time soon is it still worth working on #9321? This project is roadmapped for November and I think we are in a good shape so far. - My unittests (#12207) for Tor's entry guards got merged in little-t-tor :) Same goes for a smaller refactoring change (#12202) that improves entry code readability. - While playing with consensuses and guard nodes, I noticed that many unmeasured relays have the Fast/Stable flag; afaik this is not supposed to happen. I filed a report at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12877 but I haven't had the chance to investigate further. - Wrote two research-y [tor-dev] posts. The first is about improving Tor's entry guard data structures (#12595) and specifically about gracefully handling network offline events: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007346.html The second is about Introduction Point security in the upcoming rend-spec-ng.txt: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007335.html Both threads received helpful feedback. I still need to find something smart to respond in the first thread. - I reviewed Yawning's obfs4proxy (#12606) and it seems to be in a very good shape. I have also been running it in my bridge (it performs obfs3/obfs4) and it's serving many thousands obfs3 users every day like a boss. Yawning tagged the first release (0.0.1) yesterday, and next steps is server-side packages and client-side TBBs :) - After mentioning that the webpage needs an update with new PT information, some folks sent me an email asking me what changes are needed. I sent an email to [tor-dev] with some ideas: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007294.html Hopefully someone will pick it up :) - Tested OONI release ooni-1.1.0 and QA'ed the bridge_reachability test. We also found an FTE bug: https://github.com/kpdyer/fteproxy/issues/159 The bridge_reachability test now works quite well and the OONIs are taking good steps towards deployment. - Finished GSoC with ahmia.fi successfully :) Now that GSoC is over, Juha from ahmia.fi is in big need of developers and help. Shoot him an email at [email protected] if you are interested, or send him patches in github: https://github.com/juhanurmi/ahmia Also, enjoy a picture with ahmia's infrastructure: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/juhanurmi/ahmia/1ae0b6d255e39592029de933349f605bd6e723dc/technical_architecture.png # Activities for September 2014 - Work on #9321, the guardines stuff. During September, I hope to bring the little-t-tor patch closer to completion, write unittests and give the whole system some good testing using Chutney. I also plan to talk more with dirauth operators to get a better understanding on how to make deployment more practical. - Continue helping with obfs4 deployment and PTs. - Help more with the bridge_reachability OONI test. _______________________________________________ tor-reports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-reports
