[tor-reports] George's status report: January 2016

[George Kadianakis]

# Activities of January 2016

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

- Started a thread about revisiting proposal 246. After some discussion we
  decided that there are some open research questions remaining and the
  proposal status should be changed to "needs-research":
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010203.html

- Some folks are interested in helping out with hidden services development. I
  worked with them to get them up to speed with the latest entry guard security
  proposals. They will work on simulating proposal 259 and various variants of
  it. If a good algorithm is found, then we might also move into implementing
  it for Tor. Here is some of our communication :
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010324.html

- In the simulatory spirit of our times, I decided to write a monte carlo
  simulation of the prop247 anti-guard-discovery path selection algorithm. My
  aim was to find the ideal rotation speeds of second/third hops in an attempt
  to minimize the exposure of the second hop to an adversary. The code can be
  found here:
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/asn/hax.git/tree/simulation.py?h=prop247_simulation_draft#n243

  My initial simulations confirmed the PDF/CDF of the MinXX/MaxXX probability
  distributions from prop247. Further tests, show that the MinXX/MaxXX
  distributions don't have a big security difference from the uniform
  distribution in terms of security:
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/asn/hax.git/tree/simulation.py?h=prop247_simulation_draft

  This last result does not agree with the current proposal. For now I assume
  it's a bug in my simulation code since I basically rage hacked it.

- We received a few bug reports via hackerone. They were not very serious.

- Attended two Tor proposal reading groups and prepared notes:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010265.html
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2016-January/010328.html

- Launched the [tor-onions] mailing list:
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-onions/
    https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2016-January/040060.html

# Activities for February 2016

- Revise prop250 based on review and hopefully fit it for in.2.8.

- Planning to spend more time on the prop247 simulation. Try to find bugs and
  maybe write some tests.

- Work with Ola Bini et al. on proposal 259 and the new guard algorithms.

- Work with dgoulet on proposal 224.

- Attend Valencia meeting.