[tor-dev] Sanitized bridge descriptor format 1.0

Karsten Loesing karsten at torproject.org
Mon May 21 14:34:58 UTC 2012


Hi Damian,

I plan to make a few changes to the bridge descriptor sanitizer to
implement changes discussed on this list and in various Trac tickets.
The result will be format version 1.0.  Here's what will change compared
to the current (unversioned) format.  Can you take a look whether stem
would be happy with these descriptors and if there are other tweaks I
should do to make it even happier?

- Bridge network statuses contain a "published" line containing the
publication timestamp, so that parsers don't have to learn that
timestamp from the file name anymore.

- Bridge network status entries are ordered by hex-encoded fingerprint,
not by base64-encoded fingerprint, which is mostly a cosmetic change.

- Server descriptors and extra-info descriptors are stored under the
SHA1 hashes of the descriptor identifiers of their non-scrubbed forms.
Previously, descriptors were (supposed to be; see #5607) stored under
the digests of their scrubbed forms.  The reason for hashing digests is
to prevent looking up an existing descriptor from the bridge authority
by its non-scrubbed descriptor digest.  With this change, we don't have
to repair references between statuses, server descriptors, and
extra-info descriptors anymore which turned out to be error-prone
(#5608).  Server descriptors and extra-info descriptors contain a new
"router-digest" line with the hex-formatted descriptor identifier.
These lines are necessary, because we cannot calculate the identifier
anymore and because we don't want to rely on the file name.

- Bridge nicknames (#5684) in all descriptor types and dirreq-*
statistics lines (#5807) in extra-info descriptors are not sanitized
anymore.

- All sanitized bridge descriptors contain @type annotations (#5651).

Please let me know what you think about these changes.  I plan to start
sanitizing descriptors with the described changes tomorrow or the day
after and make them available on May 30 (or later if the
sanitizing/compressing/uploading takes much longer than expected).

Thanks,
Karsten


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