[tor-commits] [webwml/staging] Add 'Make Stegotorus deployment ready' project idea

[arma at torproject.org]

commit fb8533f7efb33698413519fa391f400265ba994d
Author: Damian Johnson <atagar at torproject.org>
Date:   Mon Feb 29 09:00:35 2016 -0800

    Add 'Make Stegotorus deployment ready' project idea
---
 getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml | 138 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 1 file changed, 138 insertions(+)

diff --git a/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml b/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml
index 6c73977..aa53608 100644
--- a/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml
+++ b/getinvolved/en/volunteer.wml
@@ -1527,6 +1527,144 @@ implementation.
     </p>
     </li>
 
+    <a id="stegotorus"></a>
+    <li>
+    <b>Make Stegotorus deployment ready</b>
+    <br>
+    Language: <i>C++</i>
+    <br>
+    Likely Mentors: <i>vmon</i>
+    <br><br>
+    <p>
+    <a
+    href="https://github.com/TheTorProject/stegotorus/tree/master/src">Stegotorus</a>
+    is a PT framework which streamline the development stealthier pluggable
+    transport. An HTTP pluggable transport is already implemented in Stegotorus
+    framework and can be used when encrypted payloads are throttled and only
+    ephemeral connections are tolerated.
+    </p>
+
+    <p>
+    The majority of work on Stegotorus is done and it can be deployed with a relatively minor improvements including:
+    </p>
+
+    <ul>
+      <li><b>#8098 A config file file for Stegotorus</b>
+        <p>
+        Stegotorus needs many configuration settings specially on the bridge
+        side. This include also the configuration required by each steg module.
+        Currently the configuration is fed to Stegotorus as command line
+        arguments but a file like torrc is needed so all tweaking can be read
+        from there.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status and work needed to be done: The code for reading the
+        config file is written by SRI but it is not yet used in the Stegotorus
+        to read the config.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>#8101 Debugging the transparent proxy</b>
+        <p>
+        Stegotorus http module uses other websites payload to hide and serve
+        censored traffic. As such it needs to decide if the request is
+        genuinely to the auxiliary website, in that case becomes a transparent
+        proxy and serves the website content as requested, or if the request is
+        actually a request to serve censored material which should be delivered
+        to steg modules.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status: This is completely implemented. However, the transparent proxy sometimes crashes and need to be triaged, debugged and fixed.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>#11337 refactoring the steg module code</b>
+        <p>
+        The http steg module code, although not essentials to the core of the
+        Stegotorus. needs some improvement and clean up. The solution is to
+        refactor the steg modules as children of FileStegMod.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current status and work needed to be done: This has already been done
+        but still needs testing and refactoring before it can be reliably merge
+        to the master branch.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>#8089 Adding Elligator to Stegotorus handshake and test</b>
+        <p>
+        The current Stegotorus handshake is distinguishable from random byte
+        string, which can be used to flag and detect Stegotorus traffic
+        deterministically and need to be implemented similar to
+        ScrambleSuite. Also because the capacity of client to server channel
+        might be slim depending on the choice of steg module it is desirable
+        to be implemented using Elliptic curve crypto. Hence, Elligator
+        protocol is ideal solution for this situation. All we need is to replace Stegotorus handshake by Elligator.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status and work needed to be done: Elligator handshake code is
+        included in stegotorus code base, it is only needed to be called by
+        instead of the current handshake and be tested.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>Make Stegotorus memory safe by using shared pointers</b>
+        <p>
+        Stegotorus has large code base and it is not written in a memory safe
+        languages. To facilitate its audit, we need to replace (almost all) use
+        of pointers to shared pointers.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status: No progress has not been done.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>Security Audit and writing more unit test</b>
+        <p>
+        To be able to deploy Stegotorus for real world use we need to audit the
+        code and write more unit test covering new aspects of the Stegotorus
+        (new http transport, proxy server, Elligator handshake)
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status: No progress has been done.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>SRI branch merging</b>
+        <p>
+        Stegotorus has been forked from the initial development from SRI. Now
+        that SRI is hosting Stegotorus publicly it is desirable to merge the
+        two branches so we can benefit from both developments.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status: No progress has been done.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+
+      <li><b>#8099 deterministic build</b>
+        <p>
+        To make deterministic build possible we need to build many of
+        Stegotorus dependency from scratch. Boost library is a a huge
+        dependency for Stegotorus to access the file system. As we are only
+        planning to deploy Stegotorus bridges on Linux machines we can simplify
+        such access without that dependency. By dropping such dependency, it
+        should be straight forward to have deterministic build for Stegotorus.
+        </p>
+
+        <p><i>
+        Current Status: No progress has been done.
+        </i></p>
+      </li>
+    </ul>
+    </li>
+
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