[tor-reports] SponsorR April 2015 Report

[David Goulet]

# Activities of April 2015

- Roger and David attended the quaterly meeting in Washington DC from the 12th
  to the 17th.

- We've done work on the lifetime of introduction points. You can find more
  information on ticket #15513. Here is the latest graph (volatile) from the
  results gathered by DonnchaC tool.

  https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/lifetimes-2015-04-22.pdf

  With this we actually found out that popularity leak is a real thing. About
  that, #15714 was created which brought #15745 as a partial fix to avoid an
  attacker to learn popularity by inflating the count of introductions and
  observe when the introduction points are cycled.

  Post about popularity:
  https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-April/008597.html

  We've also been collecting statistics on very few volunteer relays for the
  research question in #15744.

- We've been having lots of discussion and analysis (#4862) on the algorithm
  that changes the count of introduction point for an HS with traffic variation
  which is a big popularity leak. We now have a solution and will be
  implementing this soon.

- Small patch for the tpo website to mention ahmia in the hidden service
  configuration page. That's for hidden service operators who want to make
  their hidden service public and well known. Check the ticket for more ideas:
  https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15008

- More work has been done in the HS Health measurer tool (#13209). Code can be
  find here (still under development):

  https://gitlab.com/hs-health/hs-health

  A big win for the tool is that we found #15801 that is actually a pretty bad
  issue that has been fixed in #15850 (yet to be deployed) and brought the need
  for #15849.

  The hs-health tool is now reporting that ~35% of HSDir are not usable which
  is what the consensus also tells us.

- A possible guard discovery attack on HS was reported by Roger in #14917 and
  we've been able to reproduce it so we are coming up with a fix.

- We had some important HS control port command merged this month.

  ADD/DEL_ONION: #6411 - Add ephemeral HS to tor.
  HSFETCH: #14847 - Fetch an HS descriptor
  HSPOST: #3523 - Post an HS descriptor to an HSDir
  GETINFO hs/desc/id/<addr.onion>: #14845 - Get descriptor of a local service.

- HS crowdfunding campaign is going forward with more meetings happening in
  April.
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