[tor-reports] Steven's status report for June/July 2012

[Steven Murdoch]

Datagram Tor
===========

Ian Goldberg kindly sent me Joel Reardon's patch for doing his variant of datagram Tor. I tidied this up a bit and published it as a git branch (https://gitweb.torproject.org/sjm217/tor.git/shortlog/refs/heads/reardon-dtls-tor). It depends on the Daytona userspace TCP stack which is non redistributable (and I don't have a copy) so I can't test it. It is however useful to see where to patch in code (albeit on tor-0.2.0.25 as of April 2008).

I upgraded my computer so it has enough RAM to run Shadow, and submitted a patch to get it set up the way I like: https://github.com/shadow/scallion/pull/16

I talked to the resident Cambridge LLVM expert on how to automate the isolation of global state in Tor, and posted his comments here: https://github.com/shadow/scallion/issues/9

My provisional plan is to try to refactor Tor so as to make it easier to plug in alternative transports, so I can test with various options (starting with µTP).

Changes in Tor
============

At the Florence dev meeting I worked with Nick on a list of the Top-N changes in Tor since the original design paper. We'll publish a write up of these as a series of blog posts, and they'll eventually feed into a paper.

My work-in-progress is starting at Trello (https://trello.com/b/EjR4bhm5), and I think Nick is working in git. Later, we'll merge our entries in git.

Communications Data Bill
====================

I started reading up on the draft Communications Data Bill being proposed by the UK government, and what this means for Tor and privacy in general (it's not good). I talked to my MP, Julian Huppert, who is on the committee examining the proposed law, as well as with lots of people who are into fighting/declawing the bill.

Supervising
=========

My PhD student (Kumar Sharad) has arrived and got started. He's currently looking at the anonymization of the data published here is adequate: http://www.d4d.orange.com/

An undergraduate student is looking at pluggable transports. I gave him a few ideas including impersonating VoiP (thanks to Zack for that suggestion). I might have another student or two and am giving them ideas from this page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/project-ideas.html

Other stuff
========

I'm trying to recruit authors for an IEEE Internet Computing special issue on Internet Censorship and Control. Please consider submitting something: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/iccfp3

I went to PETS and the Tor Dev Meeting, at met a great group of people at both.

I had a holiday in Windsor Great Park, which is quite pretty.

I got ill and missed the Tor-EFF meet up in London.

I have found the rest of the funding from the Computer Lab, needed for me to work on my Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
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