[tor-reports] SponsorR January 2016 report

[George Kadianakis]

Hello,

here is the January 2016 report for SponsorR:

- We launched [tor-onions]! A new mailing list for hidden service operators:
    https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-onions
  
  We hope it will become a place to discuss anything about operating and
  administrating hidden services. We figured that with all these websites and
  organizations setting up hidden services lately it would be nice if there was
  a place for them to ask questions and get feedback on how to set up their
  infrastructure in the best way, and also for us to keep them informed of the
  newest developments in hidden services.  For example, it's a fine venue for
  hidden service operators to ask questions about setting up hidden services at
  scale, or embedding them in applications and the mobile, or figuring out why
  your hidden service authentication does not work.

- After months of work we pushed the code of proposal 250 for review! Here is
  the announcement:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010182.html

- Now with proposal 250 "almost" out of the way, we are moving forward with
  proposal 224: "Next Generation Hidden Services". We did some implementation
  planning and created the first tickets:

    Create tor-genkey tool:
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18098
    Torrc options ticket:
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18054

- We did some security analysis on proposal 246 and decided that the open
  research questions need further investigation. For this reason, we decided to
  change its stastus to "needs-research":
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010203.html

- We have lots of open protocol proposals, and not enough manpower to analyze
  them all let alone implement them. To address this, we started organizing
  frequent proposal reading groups where these proposals are being
  discussed. They've been very helpful so far. You can find their minutes or
  logs here:
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010265.html
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010290.html
     https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010328.html

- We setup a server component for Rob/Aaron PrivEX experiment. We are going to
  use it to experiment with secure privacy collection systems.

- Further work with the instrumentation/tracing framework of Tor:
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13802
  We plan to use it for performance evaluations and benchmarks.

- We also started putting together a list of websites that also provide onion
  services. We quickly realized there are too many of them, so we are not sure
  if we should make an exhaustive list, or just make a list of the ones we like...
    https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/projects/WeSupportTor

- Did bad-relays work. January was a pretty intense month on the malicious
  HSDir attack front. We blocked quite a lot of them.