[tor-reports] SponsorR March 2016 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the March 2016 report for SponsorR:

- During March, we worked heavily on revising proposal 224. We removed remnants
  of old crypto (TAP is gone), made some paragraphs cleaner, revisited some
  sections, fill in some missing crypto details, and figured out remaining
  research problems. We coordinated by holding an IRC meeting and discussing
  technical matters on the mailing list:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010560.html
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010534.html
  Also see: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010561.html
  for the latest suggested spec changes that we need to merge upstream.

- In the meantime, we started implementing the parts of prop224 that we
  believe are stable and don't need many revisions. Work has started in ticket
  #17238 and its children tickets.

- We did further design work on proposal 259 which is required for implementing
  proposal 247. You can find the latest version of prop259 here:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010625.html

- We fixed a hidden services bug that impacted reachability and performance:
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/15937
  and we also removed some unneeded checks which allows us to detect malicious
  HSDirs more easily:
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18332#comment:1

- We looked at some old relay statistics and discussed how we can improve
  them. We also discussed what to do with statistics that relays have been
  reporting that we might not be actually using:
   https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-March/010640.html