[tor-reports] George's status report: July 2013

[George Kadianakis]

# Top 5 goals of July 2013

- #8978 got merged! Now only #8979 remains before bridges are able to
   pass pluggable transport parameters (like shared secrets etc.) to
   BridgeDB.

- Did a fruitful BridgeDB dev session with sysrqb and isis. We categorized
  and evaluated the importance of open bugs and we also discussed how
  a social bridge distributor would look like.

  I think the next step is to fix the important bugs and implement the
  features that are necessary to bring BridgeDB in a good shape. After
  that, the plan is to design and implement a practical social bridge
  distributor based on the ideas of rBridge, Proximax, etc.

  We should write a mail to tor-dev summarizing the things we discussed.

- Tried sshproxy, an upcoming SSH transport, and it seemed to work
  fine. I also set up an sshproxy bridge. Testing bundles coming soon.

- Discussed the security and future of Hidden Services with multiple
  people. Fortunately some smart researchers are planning to look into
  them soon!

- Figured out the master plan for #7167. It seems that #7167 and #9349
  are the remaining pieces before flashproxy and obfsproxy can work
  with each other.

# Top 6 goals for August 2013

- Get #5040 finally merged.

- Start working on #9349.

- Prepare some testing pluggable transport bundles including sshproxy.

- Write a "How to deploy your Pluggable Transports" post to tor-dev.

- Add PT information on the website (mention some new transports,
  etc.) and organize an IRC meeting to discuss and plan pluggable
  transports development/deployment (probably in the end of August).

- Proceed with #8106.

  As decided during the dev meeting, before implementing the #8106
  crypto scheme, we should sketch out a proof of the protocol (using
  the random-hash/random-group model).

  I should figure out whether I have any chances of writing the proof
  in the short-term future. If not, I should outsource the proof to
  someone else.