Author: atagar Date: 2012-11-13 16:45:50 +0000 (Tue, 13 Nov 2012) New Revision: 25882

Modified: website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml Log: Adding revised tor project ideas

Nick has written four shiny, new project ideas (mmmm, shiny...).

Modified: website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml =================================================================== --- website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml 2012-11-13 16:22:30 UTC (rev 25881) +++ website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml 2012-11-13 16:45:50 UTC (rev 25882) @@ -358,15 +358,13 @@ extents, but the chief architects are Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine. </p>

- <!-- <p> <b>Project Ideas:</b><br /> - <i><a href="#resistCensorship">Improving Tor's ability to resist - censorship</a></i><br /> - <i><a href="#user-space-transport">Integrating Tor with user-space - transport protocol libraries</a></i> + <i><a href="#limitCapabilities">Run With Limited Capabilities</a></i><br /> + <i><a href="#torCleanup">Tor Codebase Cleanup</a></i><br /> + <i><a href="#httpsImersonation">HTTPS Server Impersonation</a></i><br /> + <i><a href="#chutneyExpansion">Make Chutney Do More, More Reliably</a></i> </p> - -->

<a id="project-jtor"></a> <h3><a href="https://github.com/brl/JTor/wiki">JTor</a> (<a @@ -975,6 +973,126 @@ </li> -->

+ <a id="limitCapabilities"></a> + <li> + <b>Run With Limited Capabilities</b> + <br> + Priority: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Effort Level: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Skill Level: <i>High</i> + <br> + Likely Mentors: <i>Nick (nickm)</i> + <p> + Many modern operating systems give a running program the ability to drop + capabilities that it no longer needs, and other ways for a program to run + pieces of itself in a sandbox with diminished privileges. + </p> + + <p> + We'd like to do this with Tor, to improve its resistance to attacks. The + easiest areas to address would be on systems like <a + href="https://lwn.net/Articles/475361/%22%3Erecent Linux kernels</a> that make + it easy to drop or restrict the set of syscalls that a program can invoke. + That's a great project, but probably not big enough for an internship just + on its own. For that, we'd want to make progress on at least multiple + platforms, or look into refactoring Tor into pieces that need more + privileges and pieces that don't with an eye towards sandboxing them + differently. + </p> + + <p> + See tickets <a href="https://trac.torproject.org/7005">#7005</a> and <a + href="https://trac.torproject.org/5219%22%3E#5219</a>, and their descendants, + for more information. + </p> + </li> + + <a id="torCleanup"></a> + <li> + <b>Tor Codebase Cleanup</b> + <br> + Priority: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Effort Level: <i>Low to High, depending on subproject chosen</i> + <br> + Skill Level: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Likely Mentors: <i>Nick (nickm)</i> + <p> + The Tor code is almost 10 years old in places, and we haven't always had + enough time or wisdom to write things as well as we could have. Our unit + test coverage is shamefully low, and the dependency graph of our modules is + shamefully convoluted . We could use refactoring and unit tests! Please + look through the Tor source code and look for ugly or tricky code or + dependencies -- the uglier and trickier the better -- and think about how + you could make the code look better, read better, and (subject to testing) + work better. + </p> + + <p> + If this is for a fun side-project, it would be great for you to work on + anything that can be made better and more tested. For an internship-level + position, we'd hope that you could find a number of particularly tricky or + knotty piece of the code to clean up, and aim for resolving the ugliest + problems, not necessarily the easiest. + </p> + + <p> + For a big project here, it would be great to pick one of the major + "submodules" of Tor -- path selection, node discovery, directory authority + operations, directory service -- and refactor its interface completely, to + minify and codify its points of contact with the rest of Tor. + </p> + </li> + + <a id="httpsImersonation"></a> + <li> + <b>HTTPS Server Impersonation</b> + <br> + Priority: <i>Medium</i> + <br> + Effort Level: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Skill Level: <i>Medium to High</i> + <br> + Likely Mentors: <i>Nick (nickm)</i> + <p> + We have an open proposal for a way to make Tor bridges avoid censorship by + impersonating an HTTPS server. Specifically, we need to hack some popular + SSL "reverse proxy" (your choice) so that it relays regular web connections + to an HTTP server, but certain connections to a local Tor process. <a + href="https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/proposals/203-htt... + 203</a> has a general design sketch. + </p> + </li> + + <a id="chutneyExpansion"></a> + <li> + <b>Make Chutney Do More, More Reliably</b> + <br> + Priority: <i>Medium</i> + <br> + Effort Level: <i>Medium to High, depending on scope of project</i> + <br> + Skill Level: <i>Medium</i> + <br> + Likely Mentors: <i>Nick (nickm)</i> + <p> + We have a little Python tool called <a + href="https://gitweb.torproject.org/nickm/chutney.git%22%3EChutney</a> for + making small local test networks. It's small, not widely used, and not as + automated as it could be. + </p> + + <p> + It would be great to see chutney extended and a set of supporting tests + built to the point where we could use Chutney to exercise various Tor + features as an automated integration test. + </p> + </li> + <a id="stemUsability"></a> <li> <b>Stem Usability Improvements</b>