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

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of February 2015

- A few things happened on guard security.

  After a few more tweaks, my guardfraction branch got merged to tor
  and released as part of tor-0.2.6.3-alpha.

  Also, the python script has now been deployed to three
  authorities. moria1 is even adding GuardFraction fields to the
  votes, as you can see in:
  http://128.31.0.34:9131/tor/status-vote/current/authority

- Helped write and publish a blog post about the hidden service
  statistics we analyzed! You can read it at:
  https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-statistics-about-onions

- Started a trac ticket about an option for hidden services to
  announce themselves to the world. The idea has received mixed
  feedback so far:
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15008

- Discussed some HS research topics:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-February/008245.html
  Explored some roadmap possibilites for OONI:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-February/008269.html
  Commented on the new onion.city HS search engine:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2015-February/036894.html

# Activities for March 2015

- Review some remaining bits of the Laplace little-t-tor code (#13192).

- Work on upcoming HS crowdfunding campaign.

- Work on hidden service statistics.

  We recently decided to approach this problem from a different
  angle. Instead of thinking of all the possible statistics that we
  could collect, we should think of the research problems we want to
  solve. We should find some interesting ones, and see what data we
  need to collect.

  For more short-term results, I'd also like to look into other
  statistics that might be helpful for detecting attacks. For example,
  the number of relay identity keys per IP (to detect malicious
  HSDir), or a better way to display reported bandwidths (to detect
  bandwidth faking attacks).

- Decide whether we want to change the requirements for becoming an HSDir (#8243).

- Start working on a non-statistics task. I'm not yet sure which one
  this is going to be but I will find out soon.