[tor-reports] Mike's November 2012

[Mike Perry]

Top five things done in November:

1. I helped Nick discuss and plan items for the various 0.2.4.x
milestones.

2. I tagged tickets for Pearl Crescent (our new browser hacker team) to
work on and helped them get started.

3. I attended the W3C Do Not Track and Beyond workshop, and presented
Tor Browser in an attempt to demonstrate that client-side Privacy by
Design can solve the same problems as server-side opt-out. My paper is
up at http://www.w3.org/2012/dnt-ws/agenda.html. I've also given them my
slides from the presentation. Not sure if/when/where those will appear.

4. I went further down the PathBias rabbit hole and found a few related
bugs with respect to how we handle circuit timeouts for hidden services.
Additionally, it appears that it's indeed possible to tag RELAY cells in
such a way that failure to "untag" these cells results only in stream
timeout conditions (which we also transparently retry on new circuits)
rather than full circuit destruction. Thanks to Rob Jasen for bringing
this up. Luckily, aside from the hidden service issues,
CircuitStreamTimeouts and other post-construction failure modes appear
almost non-existent in normal conditions once a circuit gets built
successfully.

5. I made progress on some tickets, but most of them still require more
work. As such, not very many tickets will end up closed under my tag for
the month:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~MikePerry201211


Top five things for December:

1. Try to do a closer review of ntor proposal versus the paper. I really
like the potential of ntor has to greatly reduce our ambient rate of
circuit failure due to CPU overload conditions, which is key for the
PathBias defense.

2. Rebase our Firefox patches for FF17-ESR, so we can get a TBB-beta
series going based on FF17-ESR (FF10-ESR hits EOL in Feb 2013). There's
a ton of review work I need to do that I probably won't get to until Q1
2013, but rebasing our existing patches and producing a working build is
step #0.

3. Figure out how to help some more with finding a Project Coordinator.
(I did a resume review last month, but more resumes have come in, and we
need to decide if we agree with my resume review and decide how to
proceed).

4. Finish off the PathBias fixes and get them merged.  Hopefully also
merge the timeout improvements from #4 above.

5. Make progress on/close the following tickets, which also includes the
PathBias tickets:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?keywords=~MikePerry201212


-- 
Mike Perry
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