On 8/30/13 8:00 AM, Karsten Loesing wrote:

Hi all,

I'd like to schedule an IRC meeting to discuss what progress we made on sponsor F deliverables in August. Time and place are:

Tue September 3, 18:00 to 19:00 UTC in #tor-dev

Below are my notes from our discussion in #tor-dev yesterday.

I usually report progress from the past month to Andrew, so that he can write a monthly report. And I usually add plans for the current month to my task organizer tool, so that I can ask people for progress. But Tom indicated interest in reading these notes. I figured I can as well send them to the list.

Note that this mail is a can-read for developers, not at all a must-read-and-give-feedback.

Best, Karsten

#2 Enable IPv6-only clients to bootstrap

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Nick is going to do #6027 ("Directory authorities on IPv6") if he can.

#3 Make Shadow/ExperimenTor/Deterlab more accurate

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Karsten is going to get #7359 ("Design/implement method for collecting/reporting statistics") ready to be merged.

#5 Make progress on proposal 195

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Nick is planning to review his own patch to #7145 ("Evaluate, possibly revise, and then implement ideas for TLS certificate normalization"), because Roger and Andrea are already hosed.

#8 Make Torperf results more realistic

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Karsten is going to write a short design document summarizing his ideas on a Torperf Twisted rewrite. He's going to send this document to tor-dev@, ideally before September 10. - Sathya is going to implement what's specified in the design document.

#10 Make UDP transport work

August: - Karsten fixed Steven's utp branch and got it working both in a client/private bridge setup in the public Tor network and in a small private Tor network created with Chutney.

September: - Karsten still has issues simulating his utp branch in Shadow which he's going to discuss with Rob and hopefully resolve together in September. - We achieved all must-do items of this deliverable and have some should-do items left, including the simulations mentioned before. Implementing or evaluating alternative approaches won't be part of year 3 anymore. Suggesting next steps will be part of preparing year 4. Quite a few people on #tor-dev would have input on a new deliverable there. - It might be useful to write a short tech report containing simulation results, so that we can reference results when making new plans. This tech report won't suggest sensible next research/development steps and likely outcomes, but will only contain experiment results. This step is optional. Putting a PDF with graphs on Trac and commenting on it would also be sufficient.

#11 Combine traffic obfuscation and address diversity

August: - David, Ximin, and George have a working prototype of obfs3-over-websocket. This prototype needs more work, because one has to start up a flash proxy manually, and because the code generally needs more cleaning up before being deployed.

September: - George is planning to do #9349 ("flashproxy facilitator: Allow clients to specify transports") by September 15, and if he can't do it on time, Ximin is going to step in. This is the facilitator part of #7167 ("Combine traffic obfuscation with address diversity of flash proxy"), so to say. - Ximin and George are optimistic that they're on track with this deliverable and that it should result in something quite robust and polished by end of October.

#12 Get user statistics for obfsproxy bridges

August: - Nick and George worked together on merging #4773 and #5040 into tor master. George asked obfsbridge operators to upgrade to tor master. There were four bridges running this code on August 31, though some of them were not configured correctly.

September: - George updated his instructions for obfsbridge operators to run tor master and report by-transport statistics on September 4. The step that was missing is that they also need to open their ExtORPort as described in #9627 ("Document ExtORPort in tor manual page"). - Roger and Nick plan to release tor 0.2.5.1-alpha in September which will contain the necessary code for bridges to report by-transport statistics. - George is going to ask people running bridges that are hard-coded in the PT TBBs to upgrade to either tor master or 0.2.5.1-alpha once it's there and open their ExtORPort. - Lunar suggests upgrading Tor Cloud images to contain either tor master or 0.2.5.1-alpha once it's there. Runa would probably do this, though she doesn't know about this plan yet.

#13 Make N23 work

August: - Charlie Belmer rebased Roger's n23-5 branch to master and started simulating it using Shadow. He ran into issues there and doesn't have useful simulation results yet.

September: - Karsten is going to help Charlie locate issues with simulating his branch, either by increasing logging and finding the problem in the logs, or by running it in Chutney.

#14 Evaluate alternate scheduling algorithms

August: - Andrea made progress on a big refactoring and pushed a non-finished version.

September: - Nick is going to review Andrea's non-finished patch when he can to give her some useful feedback. - Karsten is going to ask Andrea for an update when she's back around September 15.

#15 Investigate minimum relay bandwidth

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Karsten is going to follow up with Aaron Johnson about getting simulation results from the experiment that Roger suggested which could help answer diversity implications of raising requirements for getting the Fast flag.

#16 Make push-to-talk VoIP work

August: - Unclear. Asked Nathan in private mail on September 4.

September: - No plans known yet.

#17 Make existing VoIP client work

August: - Matt and Colin wrote a guide for the wiki: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO/Mumble. The main issue is that the proxy settings leak DNS, and torsocks doesn't work on Windows, so there is no solution for Windows at the moment.

September: - Roger suggests investigating torcap or tortilla for making Mumble work over Tor on Windows. Colin tentatively offered to take a look. - Matt opened an issue on Mumble's bug tracker about leaking DNS, and someone grabbed it. Roger suggests writing and submitting a patch, but Matt admits that this may be beyond his capabilities. Maybe following up on this bug with Mumble people could get this issue fixed. - Once the Tor network is not overloaded anymore, which will hopefully be the case in October, Matt and Colin are going to write a blog post with their instructions and get more people to try them out. Postponing until October.

#18 Improve options for private Tor networks

August: - Unclear. Asked Linus in private mail on September 4.

September: - No plans.

#19 Fix public-relay-as-bridge bug

August: - Roger received some feedback to his tor-talk@ posting from July, but he says most people didn't understand that they had to leave their tor running while testing. Roger is unconvinced that this bug has been tested much.

September: - Roger suggests not doing anything here in September, in favor of our other September work.

#20 Prototype integration of Defiance’s client-side components

August: - No progress to report.

September: - No plans.

#21 Evaluate plan for Apache in front of Defiance Tor component

August: - No progress to report.

September: - No plans.

#22 Evaluate classifiers for throttling clients

August: - No progress to report.

September: - Karsten is going to badger bandwidth authority operators to move the bandwidth authority tors to be relays, so they won't get throttled. This is #9369 ("Move the bwauths to be relays, so they won't get throttled"). - Once #9369 is done Roger thinks we can turn #9368 on ("Turn static throttling on in the live network"). - Roger mentions that doing #9368 won't fully resolve this deliverable. He should write up his idea for more responsive throttling, too. Postponed until October.