[tor-dev] GSoC Intro: Stegotorus

[vmon]

Hello Tor-devers,

It is a beautiful spring/summer day and this is vmon. I m going spend my
summer with you guys. You might think that I m a bit off schedule with
such a late GSoCc intro, but till 2 days ago I didn't know what I was going to do this summer for tor, so I couldn't write much before.

I've been using tor for a long time. I don't remember exactly when was the first time I encountered Tor but I think it was somehow through JonDo. Being behind censor, you always desperately google the word "proxy", and "Java Anonymous Proxy" came up in once. Reading more about it, lead me to Tor.

So I was a Tor user for a while, when I heard of gsoc. I talked to a
friend of mine who had a gsoc experience before. He told me that Tor/EFF
have some slots. It was a very interesting for us as we were both
frustrated with our government behavior and we wanted to do something
about it. We kept submitting our idea for a while (OK, twice) and kept
getting rejected. So finally, I decided to deal with our concerns in a more "tor-friendly" way.

One of our concerns (which is getting more serious year after year) was that what if the government decides to close down any protocol that they don't like, and only let few common protocols, e.g. http, pass through. How useful would Tor be in such a situation? Around the same time, obfsproxy came out of no where, so I thought, one way to overcome this problem was to use obfsproxy to send tor over http.

After submitting my idea, I found out that at the end of the day, it wasn't *that* original. Zack/zwol had worked on it for a year. It is called Stegotorus. However, considering, the arm-race nature of the problem and the state of development of Stegotorus, tor people (specifically asn) suggested me to polish, improve and strengthen Stegotorus, instead of re-inventing the wheel. The final obstacle, that Stegotorus wasn't open, was resolved last week and I am very excited to deliver you a strong more robust Stegotorus by the end of the summer.

Zack is my primary mentor, followed by Steven (sjmurdoc1) and Roger
(armadev) (according to Tor blog). I'll be sticking around #tor-dev
(vmon) as much as possible and I'm happy to know, talk and learn from
everyone of you.

See you on #tor-dev

Cheers,
vmon

P.S. Dear GSoC Admin, I know I'm late on my first bi-weekly update but I thought my updates makes much more sense to people, If they are proceeded by an intro. I'll send my updates shortly.