[tor-reports] What Nick did in October

[Nick Mathewson]

Well, that was certainly a busy month!

In October, I:

 * Released Tor 0.2.4.25, 0.2.5.9-rc, 0.2.5.10, and 0.2.6.1-alpha.
Thanks to the updated website build process and to a script I wrote to
automate changelog formatting and maintainance, this was a lot less
tedious than I would expected.  See the ChangeLogs and ReleaseNotes
for a list of changes in these versions.

 * Worked more on my ed25519 identity key branch.  Now it generates
all its keys correctly, and includes full tests for link handshakes
(though not the handshakes themselves).  It also includes all new
signatures in keys, with very high coverage for descriptor parsing.

 * Reviewed and merged tons of patches into 0.2.6 and a few into
0.2.5.  We've got a few new volunteers whose stuff has been of really
high quality, and a few big patches (like the circuitmux revision and
consensus diffs) that need repeated examination.  I hope we merge the
latter this month.

 * Refactored and wrote tests for a bunch of code.  (My 12498 branch
now has test coverage several percentage points better than the master
branch)

 * Began drafting a much more detailed plan for increased test coverage in Tor.

 * Merged a lot of fixes into Chutney for making test networks easier
to run and start up.

 * Added a feature to Trunnel to remember offsets within input
streams.  This should let us make our signature checking code safer
and easier to test.

 * Wrote a bunch of bugfixes and patches, including:
   - A fix for #13399 (where we only checked the first 160 bits of
microdescriptor hashes when deciding whether to download them.)
   - A fix for #13426 and #13471 (dealing with fallout from the POODLE
attack, and from OpenSSL's buggy response to it.)
   - A fix for #12423 (where we would re-download descriptors that we
didn't think were parseable)

 * Talked with a bunch of people on and off the executive committee
about how to try to improve our management processes and whatnot.

 * Announced the deprecation of Tor 0.2.3

cheers,
-- 
Nick