[tor-reports] George's status report: May 2015

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of May 2015

- Helped around with the latest DoS attack (#16052):
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-May/008838.html

- Worked on #15744. The riddle in that ticket is that currently we are
  expiring an introduction point circuit after conducting 16k
  introductions over it. We were not sure if our 16k figure was
  reasonable.

  To figure this out, we decided to collect some statistics on our
  relays that will allow us to understand the situation better. These
  new statistics have low visibility since we are only running them in
  a few relays, but they will still help us answer questions like:
    - "How many introductions happen over introduction circuits usually?" 
    - "Is 16k too low/high of a limit for the number of introductions on a circuit?"
    - "Are most hidden services volatile?"

- Reviewed Nick's ed25519 code (#12498), as well as #4862 and #8243.

- Discussed guard security with Nick and Yawning. Expect more action
  in #12595 soon.

- Discussed projects and ideas with our SoC students.

- Thought about bug bounties and rewards for little-t-tor. Also got
  accustomed with the hackerone interface.

# Activities for June 2015

- As mentioned above, during the past months we've been collecting a
  few hidden service statistics (#15744, #15515). During June we
  should wrap them up, visualize the latest updated datasets, and
  derive some initial conclusions. Maybe we can also fit a blog post
  about our findings in there, or it might wait till July.

- I managed to persuade 3 dirauth operators to start voting the entry
  guard guardfraction (#9321)!  Unfortunately, some problem occured
  and that made dirauths omit the bandwidth-weights line on the
  consensus, which is sad news.

  During the following days, I should figure out the bug (#16255) and
  get it fixed.

- Should work more with Nick on better algorithms and data structures
  for guard nodes. We have a ew ideas on how to proceed with this
  project; let's see how it goes.

- Continue work with our SoP students. I co-mentor two HS related
  projects, and I am quite happy with both:
    https://github.com/Jesse-V/OnioNS
    https://github.com/DonnchaC/onion-balance