8a89ab11c611de27227759d2869e89eab71d16a1
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

1) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
2) 
3) <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
4) <head>
Roger Dingledine call it Volunteer in the na...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

5)   <title>Tor: Volunteer</title>
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

6)   <meta name="Author" content="Roger Dingledine" />
7)   <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
8)   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css" />
9)   <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
10) </head>
11) <body>
12) 
13) <!-- TITLE BAR & NAVIGATION -->
14) 
le@svn.torproject.org made a simple change to the...

le@svn.torproject.org authored 19 years ago

15) <div class="center">
16) 
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

17) <table class="banner" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
18)     <tr>
19)         <td class="banner-left"></td>
20)         <td class="banner-middle">
21)             <a href="index.html">Home</a>
Roger Dingledine howitworks is now obsolete...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

22)           | <a href="overview.html">Overview</a>
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

23)           | <a href="download.html">Download</a>
24)           | <a href="documentation.html">Docs</a>
Roger Dingledine howitworks is now obsolete...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

25)           | <a href="support.html">Support</a>
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

26)           | <a href="faq.html">FAQs</a>
Roger Dingledine call it Volunteer in the na...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

27)           | <a class="current">Volunteer</a>
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

28)           | <a href="developers.html">Developers</a>
29)           | <a href="research.html">Research</a>
30)           | <a href="people.html">People</a>
31)         </td>
Andrew Lewman Updated the banner to inclu...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

32) 	<td class="banner-right">
Thomas Sjögren Make website valid xhtml (t...

Thomas Sjögren authored 19 years ago

33) 		<a href="/"><img src="/images/en.png" alt="English" /></a>
34) 		<a href="/index.it.html"><img src="/images/it.png" alt="Italiano" /></a>
35) 		<a href="/index.de.html"><img src="/images/de.png" alt="Deutsch" /></a> 
Andrew Lewman Updated the banner to inclu...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

36) 	</td>
Andrew Lewman renamed contribute to volun...

Andrew Lewman authored 19 years ago

37)     </tr>
38) </table>
39) 
40) <!-- END TITLE BAR & NAVIGATION -->
41) 
42) <div class="main-column">
43) 
44) <!-- PUT CONTENT AFTER THIS TAG -->
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

45) <h2>Seven things everyone can do now:</h2>
46) <ol>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

47) <li> We need users like you to try Tor out, and let the Tor developers
48) know about bugs you find or features you don't find.</li>
49) <li> Please consider <a href="/cvs/tor/doc/tor-doc-server.html">running
50) a server</a> to help the Tor network grow.</li>
51) <li> We especially need people with Windows programming skills to run
52) an exit server on Windows, to help us debug.</li>
53) <li> Run a <a href="/cvs/tor/doc/tor-hidden-service.html">Tor hidden
54) service</a> and put interesting content on it.</li>
55) <li> Take a look at the <a href="/gui/">Tor GUI Competition</a>, and
56) come up with ideas or designs to contribute to making Tor's interface
57) and usability better. Free T-shirt for each submission!</li>
58) <li> Tell your friends! Get them to run servers. Get them to run hidden
59) services. Get them to tell their friends.</li>
60) <li> Consider joining the <a href="http://secure.eff.org/tor">Electronic
61) Frontier Foundation</a>. More EFF donations means more freedom in the
62) world, including more Tor development.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

63) </ol>
64) 
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

65) <h2>Installers</h2>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

66) <ol>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

67) <li>Extend our NSIS-based Windows installer to include Privoxy. Include
68) a preconfigured config file to work well with Tor. We might also want
69) to include FreeCap -- is it stable enough and useful enough to be
70) worthwhile?</li>
71) <li>Develop a way to handle OS X uninstallation
72) that is more automated than telling people to <a
73) href="http://tor.eff.org/doc/tor-doc-osx.html#uninstall">manually remove
74) each file</a>.</li>
75) <li>Our <a href="http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/tor.spec.in">RPM spec file</a>
76) needs a maintainer, so we can get back to the business of writing Tor. If
77) you have RPM fu, please help out.</li>
78) </ol>
79) 
80) <h2>Usability and Interface</h2>
81) <ol>
82) <li>We need a way to intercept DNS requests so they don't "leak" while
83) we're trying to be anonymous. (This happens because the application does
84) the DNS resolve before going to the SOCKS proxy.) One option is to use
85) Tor's built-in support for doing DNS resolves; but you need to ask via
86) our new socks extension for that, and no applications do this yet. A
87) nicer option is to use Tor's controller interface: you intercept the
88) DNS resolve, tell Tor about the resolve, and Tor replies with a dummy IP
89) address. Then the application makes a connection through Tor to that dummy
90) IP address, and Tor automatically maps it back to the original query.</li>
91) <li>People running servers tell us they want to have one BandwidthRate
92) during some part of the day, and a different BandwidthRate at other parts
93) of the day. Rather than coding this inside Tor, we should have a little
94) script that speaks via the <a href="/gui/">Tor Controller Interface</a>,
95) and does a setconf to change the bandwidth rate. Perhaps it would run out
96) of cron, or perhaps it would sleep until appropriate times and then do
97) its tweak (that's probably more portable). Can somebody write one for us
98) and we'll put it into <a href="/cvs/tor/contrib/">tor/contrib/</a>?</li>
99) <li>We have a variety of ways to <a
100) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ChooseEntryExit">exit
101) the Tor network from a particular country</a>, but they all
102) require specifying the nickname of a particular Tor server. It
103) would be nice to be able to specify just a country, and
104) have something automatically pick. This requires having some
105) component that knows what country each Tor node is in. The <a
106) href="http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit.pl">script on
107) serifos</a> manually parses whois entries for this. Maybe geolocation
108) data will also work?</li>
109) <li>Speaking of geolocation data, somebody should draw a map of the Earth
110) with a pin-point for each Tor server. Bonus points if it updates as the
111) network grows and changes.</li>
112) <li>Tor provides anonymous connections, but we don't support
113) keeping multiple pseudonyms in practice (say, in case you
114) frequently go to two websites and if anybody knew about both of
115) them they would conclude it's you). We should find a good approach
116) and interface for handling pseudonymous profiles in Tor. See <a
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

117) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Dec-2004/msg00086.html">this
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

118) post</a> and <a
119) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jan-2005/msg00007.html">followup</a>
120) for details.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

121) </ol>
122) 
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

123) <h2>Documentation</h2>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

124) <ol>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

125) <li>Please volunteer to help maintain this website: code, content,
Roger Dingledine and i would like a pony.

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

126) css, layout. Step one is to hang out on the IRC channel until we
127) get to know you.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

128) <li>We have too much documentation --- it's spread out too much and
129) duplicates itself in places. Please send us patches, pointers, and
130) confusions about the documentation so we can clean it up.</li>
131) <li>Help translate the web page and documentation into other
132) languages. See the <a href="translation.html">translation
133) guidelines</a> if you want to help out. We also need people to help
134) maintain the existing (Italian and German) translations.</li>
135) <li>Investigate privoxy vs. freecap vs. sockscap for win32 clients. Are
136) there usability or stability issues that we can track down and
137) resolve, or at least inform people about?</li>
Roger Dingledine and i would like a pony.

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

138) <li>Can somebody help Matt Edman with the documentation and how-tos
139) for his <a href="http://freehaven.net/~edmanm/torcp/">Windows Tor
140) Controller</a>?
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

141) <li>Evaluate, create, and <a
142) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorifyHOWTO">document
143) a list of programs</a> that can be routed through Tor.</li>
144) <li>We need better documentation for dynamically intercepting
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

145) connections and sending them through Tor. tsocks (Linux) and freecap
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

146) (Windows) seem to be good candidates.</li>
147) <li>We have a huge list of <a href="/support.html">potentially useful
148) programs that interface to Tor</a>. Which ones are useful in which
149) situations? Please help us test them out and document your results.</li>
150) </ol>
151) 
152) <h2>Coding and Design</h2>
153) <ol>
154) <li>We recommend Privoxy as a good scrubbing web proxy, but it's
155) unmaintained and still has bugs, especially on Windows. While we're at
156) it, what sensitive information is not kept safe by Privoxy? Are there
157) other scrubbing web proxies that are more secure?</li>
158) <li>tsocks appears to be unmaintained: we have submitted several patches
159) with no response. Can somebody volunteer to start maintaining a new
160) tsocks branch? We'll help.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

161) <li>Right now the hidden service descriptors are being stored on just a few
162) directory servers. This is bad for privacy and bad for robustness. To get
163) more robustness, we're going to need to make hidden service descriptors
164) even less private because we're going to have to mirror them onto many
165) places. Ideally we'd like to separate the storage/lookup system from the
166) Tor directory servers entirely. Any reliable distributed storage system
167) will do, as long as it allows authenticated updates. As far as we know,
168) no implemented DHT code supports authenticated updates. What's the right
169) next step?</li>
170) <li>Tor exit servers need to do many DNS resolves in parallel. But
171) gethostbyname() is poorly designed --- it blocks until it has finished
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

172) resolving a query --- so it requires its own thread or process. So Tor
173) is forced to spawn many separate DNS "worker" threads. There are some
174) asynchronous DNS libraries out there, but historically they are buggy and
175) abandoned. Are any of them stable, fast, clean, and free software? If so
176) (or if we can make that so), we should integrate them into Tor. See <a
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

177) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2005/msg00001.html">Agl's
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

178) post</a> for one potential approach.</li>
Roger Dingledine start to rewrite the volunt...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

179) <li>Currently Tor ships with its own AES, since when we started OpenSSL
180) had missing/broken AES support. But now that it's gotten more mainstream,
181) we should change things so we only use our bundled AES if OpenSSL doesn't
182) support it natively.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

183) <li>Tor 0.1.1.x includes support for hardware crypto accelerators via
184) OpenSSL. Nobody has ever tested it, though. Does somebody want to get
185) a card and let us know how it goes?</li>
Roger Dingledine start to rewrite the volunt...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

186) <li>Because Tor servers need to store-and-forward each cell they handle,
187) high-bandwidth Tor servers end up using dozens of megabytes of memory
188) just for buffers. We need better heuristics for when to shrink/expand
189) buffers. Maybe this should be modelled after the Linux kernel buffer
190) design, where you have many smaller buffers that link to each other,
191) rather than monolithic buffers?</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

192) <li>How do ulimits work on Win32, anyway? We're having problems,
Roger Dingledine start to rewrite the volunt...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

193) especially on older Windowses with people running out of file
194) descriptors, connection buffer space, etc. (We should handle
195) WSAENOBUFS as needed, look at the MaxConnections registry entry,
196) look at the MaxUserPort entry, and look at the TcpTimedWaitDelay
197) entry. We may also want to provide a way to set them as needed. See <a
Thomas Sjögren Make website valid xhtml (t...

Thomas Sjögren authored 19 years ago

198) href="http://bugs.noreply.org/flyspray/index.php?do=details&amp;id=98">bug
Roger Dingledine start to rewrite the volunt...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

199) 98</a>.)</li>
200) <li>Encrypt identity keys on disk, and implement passphrase protection
201) for them. Right now they're just stored in plaintext.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

202) <li>Patches to Tor's autoconf scripts. First, we'd like our configure.in
203) to handle cross-compilation, e.g. so we can build Tor for obscure
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

204) platforms like the Linksys WRTG54. Second, we'd like the with-ssl-dir
205) option to disable the search for ssl's libraries.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

206) <li>Implement reverse DNS requests inside Tor (already specified in
207) Section 5.4 of <a href="/cvs/tor/doc/tor-spec.txt">tor-spec.txt</a>).</li>
208) <li>Perform a security analysis of Tor with <a
209) href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing">"fuzz"</a>. Determine
210) if there good fuzzing libraries out there for what we want. Win fame by
211) getting credit when we put out a new release because of you!</li>
212) <li>How hard is it to patch bind or a DNS proxy to redirect requests to
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

213) Tor via our <a href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#CompatibleApplications">tor-resolve socks extension</a>? What about to convert UDP DNS
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

214) requests to TCP requests and send them through Tor?</li>
Roger Dingledine and i would like a pony.

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

215) <li>Tor uses TCP for transport and TLS for link
216) encryption. This is nice and simple, but it means all cells
217) on a link are delayed when a single packet gets dropped, and
218) it means we can only reasonably support TCP streams. We have a <a
219) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#TransportIPnotTCP">list
220) of reasons why we haven't shifted to UDP transport</a>, but it would be
221) great to see that list get shorter.
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

222) <li>We're not that far from having IPv6 support for destination addresses
223) (at exit nodes). If you care strongly about IPv6, that's probably the
224) first place to start.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

225) </ol>
226) 
227) <h2>Research</h2>
228) <ol>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

229) <li>The "website fingerprinting attack": make a list of a few
230) hundred popular websites, download their pages, and make a set of
231) "signatures" for each site. Then observe a Tor client's traffic. As
232) you watch him receive data, you quickly approach a guess about which
233) (if any) of those sites he is visiting. First, how effective is
234) this attack on the deployed Tor codebase? Then start exploring
235) defenses: for example, we could change Tor's cell size from 512
236) bytes to 1024 bytes, we could employ padding techniques like <a
237) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#timing-fc2004">defensive dropping</a>,
238) or we could add traffic delays. How much of an impact do these have,
239) and how much usability impact (using some suitable metric) is there from
240) a successful defense in each case?</li>
Roger Dingledine point to a paper that might...

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

241) <li>The "end-to-end traffic confirmation attack":
242) by watching traffic at Alice and at Bob, we can <a
243) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#danezis:pet2004">compare
244) traffic signatures and become convinced that we're watching the same
245) stream</a>. So far Tor accepts this as a fact of life and assumes this
246) attack is trivial in all cases. First of all, is that actually true? How
247) much traffic of what sort of distribution is needed before the adversary
248) is confident he has won? Are there scenarios (e.g. not transmitting much)
249) that slow down the attack? Do some traffic padding or traffic shaping
250) schemes work better than others?</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

251) <li>The "routing zones attack": most of the literature thinks of
252) the network path between Alice and her entry node (and between the
253) exit node and Bob) as a single link on some graph. In practice,
254) though, the path traverses many autonomous systems (ASes), and <a
255) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004">it's not uncommon
256) that the same AS appears on both the entry path and the exit path</a>.
257) Unfortunately, to accurately predict whether a given Alice, entry,
258) exit, Bob quad will be dangerous, we need to download an entire Internet
259) routing zone and perform expensive operations on it. Are there practical
260) approximations, such as avoiding IP addresses in the same /8 network?</li>
261) <!--<li>Find ideal churn rate for helper nodes; how safe is it?</li> -->
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

262) <li>Tor doesn't work very well when servers have asymmetric bandwidth
263) (e.g. cable or DSL). Because Tor has separate TCP connections between
264) each hop, if the incoming bytes are arriving just fine and the outgoing
265) bytes are all getting dropped on the floor, the TCP push-back mechanisms
266) don't really transmit this information back to the incoming streams.
267) Perhaps Tor should detect when it's dropping a lot of outgoing packets,
268) and rate-limit incoming streams to regulate this itself? I can imagine
269) a build-up and drop-off scheme where we pick a conservative rate-limit,
270) slowly increase it until we get lost packets, back off, repeat. We
271) need somebody who's good with networks to simulate this and help design
272) solutions; and/or we need to understand the extent of the performance
273) degradation, and use this as motivation to reconsider UDP transport.</li>
274) <li>A related topic is congestion control. Is our
275) current design sufficient once we have heavy use? Maybe
276) we should experiment with variable-sized windows rather
277) than fixed-size windows? That seemed to go well in an <a
278) href="http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/theory.php">ssh
279) throughput experiment</a>. We'll need to measure and tweak, and maybe
280) overhaul if the results are good.</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

281) <li>To let dissidents in remote countries use Tor without being blocked
282) at their country's firewall, we need a way to get tens of thousands of
283) relays, not just a few hundred. We can imagine a Tor client GUI that
284) has a "help China" button at the top that opens a port and relays a
285) few KB/s of traffic into the Tor network. (A few KB/s shouldn't be too
286) much hassle, and there are few abuse issues since they're not being exit
287) nodes.) But how do we distribute a list of these volunteer clients to the
288) good dissidents in an automated way that doesn't let the country-level
289) firewalls intercept and enumerate them? Probably needs to work on a
290) human-trust level.</li>
291) <!-- <li>Is exiting from the middle of the circuit always a bad idea?</li>
Roger Dingledine revamp the volunteer page....

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

292) <li>It's not that hard to DoS Tor servers or dirservers. Are puzzles the
Roger Dingledine revamp again

Roger Dingledine authored 19 years ago

293) right answer? What other practical approaches are there?</li> -->