Deliverable List for Sponsor F, November 1, 2011
Note that November 1, 2011 is the date when we need a status update which of the deliverables are done or what's missing to complete them. But not all deliverables on this page are due November 1, 2011:
- Some deliverables should be finished much earlier, because we already promised them for May or June.
- Some deliverables are due November 1.
- Some deliverables are due November 30, but we should have a very good intuition whether we'll finish them on time by November 1.
Which due date belongs to which deliverable is written below.
Some deliverable statuses below have not been updated. See wiki:org/sponsors/SponsorF/Year1 for deliverable statuses as of November 2011.
Analysis
-
Comparison of datagram Tor designs
- Done: We need to compare existing UDP designs (#1855 (moved)), figure out what we want to do and why it's the right thing to do. This may require bringing researchers together and discussing their approaches, which in turn requires coordination on Tor side. Due date was May 1. [sjmurdoch]
-
Why else is Tor slow?
- Not done: We should write a draft as a follow-up to performance.pdf. Due date is November 1. [arma]
-
Analysis for increasing the set of guards
- Done: We wrote a blog post containing the research questions. Next step is to find a grad student to start answering them. Due date is November 1. [arma]
-
Security tradeoffs from using a SOCKS proxy vs. a bridge
- Not done: We should write a blog post about these possible tradeoffs (#2764 (moved), #3292 (moved)). Due date was June 1. [arma]
-
Preventing relays from enumerating bridges
- Done: We need to assess options for preventing relays from enumerating bridges. Nick wrote proposal 188 that suggests using bridge guards and Tor's loose source routing feature. Due date is November 30. [nickm]
-
FC paper proposing adaptive bridge address distribution
- Not done: We should write a summary of the paper, point out why it's so exciting, but then list open research questions. Due date is November 30. [arma]
-
Bridge descriptor retrieval and storage
- Done: We now have a patch for Tonga to write daily statistics about bridge server descriptor downloads to disk. These statistics include total requests per day, number of unique bridges of which server descriptors were requested, and a few percentiles of requested descriptors per bridge (#4200 (moved), #4294 (moved)). Due date is November 30. [Sebastian]
- Not done: Write a blog post comparing different bridge usage requirements from only using bridges by IP address to updating descriptors from Tonga. Due date is November 30. [Sebastian]
- Not done: Write a proposal to store information about bridges in a client's state file. Optionally, write a proposal to retrieve descriptors from Tonga. Due date is November 30. [Sebastian]
-
Analysis of passive bridge reachability data
- Done: We already made progress on this for sponsor E for September 15. Due date for sponsor F is November 30. [karsten]
-
Bridge churn analysis
- Done: Wrote a tech report "An Analysis of Tor Bridge Stability, Making BridgeDB give out at least one stable bridge per user" (#4255 (moved)). Due date is November 30. [karsten]
-
Censorship detector
- Done: George Danezis wrote a censorship detector that analyzes daily user numbers and detects unusual up- or downturns (#2718 (moved)), e.g., this recent possible censorship event in Iran. Needs fine-tuning. Due date is November 30. [karsten]
Tor Client
-
Tor 0.2.2.x stable release
- Done: We have a stable release (#3032 (moved)). Due date was June 1. [nickm and arma]
-
Eliminate TLS renegotiation
- Done: We should get rid of TLS renegotiation to make Tor traffic stand out less. Implemented and merged, will need more cleanup if we discover bugs. In theory, this is due November 30, but we should finish it much earlier. [nickm]
-
Draft designs for alternate crypto ops
- Done: We have a draft proposal. Due date is November 30. [nickm]
Tor Relay
-
Microdescriptor roll-out for client-side
- Done: We also promised to make progress on this for sponsor D for August 31 (#1748 (moved)). Due date for sponsor F was May 1. [nickm]
-
Libevent2 working for Windows bundles
- Not done: We also promised to make progress on this for sponsor D for August 31 (#2007 (closed)). Due date for sponsor F was June 1. [nickm]
-
UPnP working without Vidalia
- Done: We already completed this for sponsor D for August 31. Due date for sponsor F is November 30. [sjmurdoch]
- Ongoing: We may have to fork the UPnP library as the release management practice is rather poor, but not necessarily for the November milestone. [sjmurdoch]
-
PMP for port forwarding in Tor or Vidalia
- Not done: Need to investigate PMP libraries. See tor-fw-helper, incl. #1983 (moved). The work on UPnP in Tor will solve part of making PMP in Tor, too. Due date is November 30. [sjmurdoch]
- Ongoing: We may have to fork the NAT PMP library as the release management practice is rather poor. [sjmurdoch]
Tor Bridge
- Bridges on IPv6
- Not done: Nick wrote proposal 186 which enables relays and bridges to advertise multiple address/port combinations for their OR port. This is a requirement for implementing bridges on IPv6. Linus and Nick will have done more by end of October (#3563 (moved)). Due date is November 30. [nickm and ln5]
Tor bundles/installation
- Bridge-by-default bundles
- Done: See "Unstable Bridge-by-Default Vidalia Bundle" on the download page. [erinn]
Pluggable transport
- Support camouflaged transport
- Done: We need a proposal for a modular transport spec. Due date was March 15. (#2758 (moved)) [nickm]
- Done: We need proof-of-concept transport plugins (for team use; not required for use by user in country): http headers (#2759 (moved)) and superencryption (#2760 (moved)). Due date was June 1. [nickm]
- Deferred: Implement all of the tor-side parts of Proposal 180 in order to make proxies easy to configure. The goal for November 30 was to write the proposal, not to implement it. Deferring to one of the 2012 milestones. [nickm with asn]
- Deferred: We should prepare a bundle that includes obfsproxy and get actual users using it. This task wasn't explicitly written in the year 1 contract, even though it would have been nice. Deferring to one of the 2012 milestones. [nickm]
Torflow
- Bandwidth authority improvements
- Partially done: Better tracking for measurement feedback (#1976 (moved)). Due date is November 1. [mikeperry and aagbsn]
- Done: Upgrade the bwscanners to the new SQLALchemy release (#2391 (moved)). Due date was June 30. [mikeperry and aagbsn]
- Done: Write a bwscanner spec (#2861 (moved)). Due date was June 30. [mikeperry and aagbsn]
- Done: Set up a 5th scanner (#1778 (moved)). Due date was June 30. [mikeperry and aagbsn]
BridgeDB
- BridgeDB spec
- Done: We have a BridgeDB spec draft (#1606 (moved)). Due date is November 30. [karsten]
Torbutton
-
Attempt Firefox Mobile release of Torbutton
- Ongoing: We attempted porting Torbutton to Fennec (#1506 (closed)), but ran into problems with their new multi-process API system they decided to debut on mobile. We may take another shot or write down why our attempt failed. Due date was June 1. [mikeperry]
-
Stable release of Torbutton (#3071 (closed))
- Done: Torbutton 1.4.0 is out. Due date was June 30. [mikeperry]
-
Continue to keep in touch with Chrome folks
- Ongoing: Opened tickets for Chrome fixes that get us closer to Tor on Chrome (#1770 (closed), #1816 (closed), #1925 (closed), #2956 (moved), #3072 (closed)). More tickets might get added and/or closed. "Due date" was June 30. [mikeperry]
-
Fork Firefox 4 for Tor Browser Bundle
- Done: Forked (#2871 (closed)). Due date is November 30. [mikeperry]
-
CSS Font fixes
- Not done: #2872 (closed). Due date is November 30. [mikeperry]
-
CSS media query/resolution fixes
- Not done: #2875 (closed). Due date is November 30. [mikeperry]
Tor Cloud
- Experiments with change-my-IP interface
- Done: There is no change-my-IP interface, but users can get a new IP address by stopping and starting their EC2 instance (#3606 (closed)). Due date was June 1. [Runa]