[tor-reports] Core Tor September work for sponsor U report

[isabela at riseup.net]

Core Tor Team September 2016 report

We had our Tor Dev Meeting in Seattle during the last week of September. We did quite a bit of work to prepare for it, the discussions and also start working on getting release 0.2.9 into frozen state, schedule for Oct.

Part of our conversations during Dev Meeting was related to our workflow and also our release circles. We discussed the reasons that caused delays on getting a release candidate out. Most are due to bugs found later on in the release cycle. To start fixing that we will organize a call for relays operators to help us test our alpha releases, we will seek a diverse representation of the ecosystem out there so we can cover all edge cases. Our goal is to try getting the first pilot for our 0.2.9 that is coming up. 

-> A detailed high- and low-level overview of all modules in Tor, their data flows, their intended interactions, and their actual behaviors.

While at the developer meeting, we made fairly extensive diagrams of the Tor object models, in preparation for making them more formally available and accompanied by textual description. We also identified areas most in need of description.  (This work is still on paper.)

Guard node improvements:
#19858 [1] -  Move guard state out of globals per new guard plan 	

Improved public identity keys for Tor relays:

#20051 [2] We did some housekeeping and increased test coverage for ed25519 link handshake code.

Additionally, we completed the core of the ed25519 circuit handshake code on a work-in-progress branch. The remaining work here will be testing, cleanup, refinement, evaluation, and review.

	#19301 [3] Accept Ed25519 identities in EXTEND2 cells
	#19302 [4] Send ed25519 IDs in EXTEND2 cells
	#19303 [5] Created a patch for some functions related to prop220 to be using trunnel

We finished testing on the link-protocol parts of the ed25519 link handshake as described above, and began review and cleanup [6]. 

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19858
[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/20051
[3] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19301
[4] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19302
[5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19303
[6] https://gitlab.com/nickm_tor/tor/merge_requests/7