[tor-commits] r26643: {website} Improve Panopticlick project description. (website/trunk/getinvolved/en)

[Mike Perry]

Author: mikeperry
Date: 2014-03-07 20:54:50 +0000 (Fri, 07 Mar 2014)
New Revision: 26643

Modified:
   website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml
Log:
Improve Panopticlick project description.



Modified: website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml
===================================================================
--- website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml	2014-03-07 16:15:03 UTC (rev 26642)
+++ website/trunk/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml	2014-03-07 20:54:50 UTC (rev 26643)
@@ -1716,22 +1716,54 @@
     <br>
     Skill Level: <i>Medium</i>
     <br>
-    Likely Mentors: <i>Georg (GeKo)</i>
+    Likely Mentors: <i>Georg (GeKo)</i>, <i>Mike Perry</i>, <i>Nicolas Vigier</i>
     <p>
-Tor Browser users are often complaining about their browser fingerprint
-being not as good as it should according to the <a
-href="https://panopticlick.eff.org">Panopticlick of the EFF</a>. To fix
-that the student should develop an own <a
-href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf">Panopticlick</a>
-instance which performs, in a first step, basic tests estimating the
-uniformity among Tor Browser Bundle users. The user should get
-feedback on how she performed and the test results should be available
-in a machine readable format (e.g. JSON). In a second step one could
-think about adding more sophisticated tests or <a
-href="https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119#comment:1">supporting
-other browser vendors</a> that might want to test the uniformity amongst
-their userbase as well.
+
+The <a href="https://panopticlick.eff.org">Panopticlick project by the EFF</a>
+revolutionized how people think about <a
+href="https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf">browser
+fingerprinting</a>, both by developing tests and metrics to measure browser
+fingerprintability, and by crowdsourcing the evaluation and contribution of
+individual browser features to overall fingerprintability.
+
     </p>
+    <p>
+
+Unfortunately, the way Panopticlick is designed <a
+href="https://blog.torproject.org/blog/effs-panopticlick-and-torbutton">makes
+it difficult</a> to evaluate defenses to browser fingerprinting, especially
+for browsers with a relatively small userbase such as Tor Browser. This is
+because any approach we take to reduce fingerprinting automatically makes our
+users more distinct from the previous users who submitted their fingerprint
+data to the EFF. Indeed, it is also impossible to ever expect that users of
+one browser will ever be able to blend in with users of another browser
+(Chrome users will always be distinguishable from Firefox users for example,
+based on feature set alone).
+
+   </p>
+   <p>
+
+To address this, we would like to have <a
+href=">https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6119">our own
+fingerprint test suite</a> to evaluate the fingerprintability of each browser
+feature for users running a specific Tor Browser version. There are also <a
+href="https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~tbb-fingerprinting">additional
+fingerprinting tests</a> we can add beyond those deployed by Panopticlick.
+   </p>
+   <p>
+
+For this project, the student would develop a website that users can
+voluntarily visit to test and record their Tor Browser fingerprint.  The user
+should get feedback on how she performed and the test results should be
+available in a machine readable format (e.g. JSON), broken down by Tor Browser
+version.  In a second step one could think about adding more sophisticated
+tests or supporting other browser vendors that might want to test the
+uniformity amongst their userbase as well. Of course, results from each
+browser would also need to be broken down by both browser implementation and
+version, so that results would only reflect the population of that specific
+implementation.
+
+    </p>
     </li>
 
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