[tor-bugs] #7520 [BridgeDB]: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#7520: Design and implement a social distributor for BridgeDB
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  aagbsn       |          Owner:     
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:     
Component:  BridgeDB     |        Version:     
 Keywords:  SponsorZ     |         Parent:     
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:     
-------------------------+--------------------------------------------------

Comment(by jhd):

 Hello! I am a grad student working on a thesis that is related to Tor
 bridge distribution. I'm not funded by a grant, so mine is sort of a solo
 effort, but I thought I might try to contribute a little bit before I
 finish my thesis up.

   I should also note that Damon told me a year or so back that he wants to
 pick up the Proximax work and get some grants and some grad students to
 work on it. This ticket in particular sounds like it needs a few research
 papers written before we have a good handle on what we should deploy. In
 particular, one of the first things I'd want to see is a list of attacks
 on Proximax that aim to skew its results.

 While doing some preliminary research, I found a very recent paper on Tor
 bridge distribution. See the citation below (pdf is available via Google
 Scholar).

 Wang, Q., Lin, Z., Borisov, N., & Hopper, N. J. rBridge: User Reputation
 based Tor Bridge Distribution with Privacy Preservation.

 They have a similar approach to distributing bridges as defined above
 (credit/reputation based system), and they claim to outperform Proximax.
 Some disadvantages I see are that their privacy preservation feature
 introduces some overhead and also forces a random selection of bridges for
 each user (Wouldn't it be better if you could determine the bridges to
 give a new user based on who invited them?).

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7520#comment:9>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online