[tor-reports] Tom's November 2014

[Tom Ritter]

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Depictor / Consensus-Health
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The HTML-producing part of the DocTor (in the old 'java' branch) has
been cut over to python and given its own project name.

With my shiny new ldap I got access to a user and official repo for
Depictor [0][1].  Not sure how I'll manage the difference.  The code
for depictor is in both of them.

consensus-health.torproject.org will be cut over to depictor once I
have access[2].  For now, it is running on my box at
http://utternoncesense.com


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CA Certificates for .onions
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I started two threads, one a general overview of the space[3] and the
other on a specific technical measure on how to safely prove ownership
of a HS[4]

I'm also in discussions with people in the CAB Forum and am gently
trying to make progress on this on several fronts at once.


-------------------------
little-t tor
-------------------------
I published my blog post on how to run an alternate tor network [5].
Numerous things abound in here for me to fix or research if I can find
time.  Among them would be how difficult it is to have a node be on
two networks at once, fixing up some documentation of parameters, and
developing a safe way to add DirAuths without risking splitting the
network.  I may have come up with an approach for the last one, but
without testing it a dozen different ways I don't want to share it for
fear it's trivially bypassed.

I also ran down a bug I had seen in the bootstrapping process [6][7].
treor's been working on a patch that I should test.


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Tor Browser
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PartitionAlloc info from [8]:

Mozilla is working on moving to jemalloc3 which will have a
partitioned heap. I believe they are hoping to have this for the next
ESR, but it's not guaranteed. More:
http://guilherme-pg.com/2014/10/15/Partitioned-heap-in-Firefox-pt1.html

I have a ctmalloc build compiling on Linux 4.5 alpha. My patches are:
https://github.com/tomrittervg/tor-browser/commits/tor-browser-31.2.0esr-4.5-1-build5-ctmalloc
https://github.com/tomrittervg/tor-browser-builder/commits/tjr-ctmalloc

Unfortunately, my implementation of memalign is wrong I need to hack
at PartitionAlloc to support that, which will be a bit risky and
tricky. Also, once jemalloc3 comes along, the advantages of using
PartitionAlloc are much fewer, although some of the work (e.g. random
partitioning based on callsite) could likely be ported over as defense
in depth.



-tom

[0] https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/tom/depictor.git
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/depictor.git
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13735
[3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007786.html
[4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007853.html
[5] https://ritter.vg/blog-run_your_own_tor_network.html
[6] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007758.html
[7] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13718
[8] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10281#comment:13