[tor-reports] What Nick did in August

[Nick Mathewson]

>From the commonwealth of Massachusetts, where labor day comes in
September, and May First is officially designated "Loyalty Day"[-1], I
send you tidings!

Over the past month:

   - I completed implementation and testing of "Trunnel", a tool to
     automatically produce simple C code to parse and encode binary
     formats like the ones Tor uses. Finishing the implementation
     required adding accessor functions and a bunch more test cases.
     I sent an announcement as [0]; that URL has numerous other
     interesting links.

   - Fixed a bunch of the outstanding coverity bugs.

   - Wrote a branch to add ed25519 primitives to Tor for proposal
     220, along with the ed25519 variant/extension functionality
     we'll need for next-gen hidden services (proposal 224), and for
     cross-certification with onion keys (proposal 228).  These patches
     don't yet make Tor use ed25519; they only add the necessary
     backend functions so that Tor can be made to use ed25519.  For
     the branch, see #12980.

   - Write a branch to add improved password hashing to Tor for
     use in better hashedcontrolpassword and better
     encrypted-stored-key stuff.  The branch is on #12981; as above,
     it's backend-only.  The encrypted-stored-key stuff becomes more
     interesting for proposals 220 and 224.

   - I learned a bit of coccinelle [1] and used it to write some
     patches. (eg 12855, 12864)

   - Andrea and I triaged a bunch of tickets.

   - Sebastian and I had our final (official for GSoc) meetings with
     our GSoc students, helping them get their projects done.

   - At Roger's recommendation, I gave an interview to Joe McGonegal of
     "Slice of MIT." [2]

   - I merged a bunch of pending libevent patches, and worked on a
     few more in my spare time.

   - We reviewed and merged too many patches to mention.
     Some interesting ones are:
     - 12848 Tor wrongly process circuit as connected to n_chan if
             create cell delivery failed
     - 12908 Warn when running a relay and a hidden service in the
             same process
     - 12061 Support logging to named pipes

   - I wrote a bunch of patches and fixes not mentioned above, including:
     - 12855 Use calloc and reallocarray instead of malloc(a*b),...
     - 12864 CookieAuthFileGroupReadable regression
     - proposal 215/#10163 (Make '13' the minimum consensus method)
     - 11792 Consider directory connections zlib buffers when handling OOM
     - 10116 Avoid memory allocation in OOM handler
     - 11264 Relay has Exit flag but short policy says reject *?
     - 7419 Choose a faster memwipe implementation
     - 12693 autoreconf 2.62 can't handle AS_VAR_IF in our configure.ac

   - Commented (hopefully helpfully) on various tickets, including:
     - 9321 Load balance right when we have higher guard rotation periods
     - 12595 Think of better data structures for guard nodes
     - 12751 systemd unit file could use more filesystem namespace
             hardening options

THIS MONTH:

  - Finish schedule.
  - Release another 0.2.5.x.
  - Release an 0.2.6.1-alpha, maybe.
  - Cut the number of pending needs-review tickets by a lot
  - Implement much of 0.2.6.
  - TBD depending on schedule.

[-1] http://law.justia.com/codes/massachusetts/2014/part-i/title-ii/chapter-6/section-12o

[0] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007355.html

[1] http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/

[2] https://slice.mit.edu/2014/08/28/tor-project/