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en/volunteer.wml   4) #include "head.wmi" TITLE="Volunteer"

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en/volunteer.wml   9) <h2>Four things everyone can do now:</h2>

volunteer.html    10) <ol>

en/volunteer.wml  11) <li> Please consider <a href="<cvssandbox>tor/doc/tor-doc-server.html">running

volunteer.html    12) a server</a> to help the Tor network grow.</li>

en/volunteer.wml  13) <li> Take a look at the <a href="<page gui/index>">Tor GUI Competition</a>, and

volunteer.html    14) come up with ideas or designs to contribute to making Tor's interface
volunteer.html    15) and usability better. Free T-shirt for each submission!</li>
volunteer.html    16) <li> Tell your friends! Get them to run servers. Get them to run hidden
volunteer.html    17) services. Get them to tell their friends.</li>

en/volunteer.wml  18) <li> We are looking for funding and sponsors. If you like Tor, please
en/volunteer.wml  19)   <a href="<page donate>">take a moment to donate to support further
en/volunteer.wml  20)   Tor development</a>. Also, if you know any

en/volunteer.wml  21)   companies, NGOs, or other organizations that want communications
en/volunteer.wml  22)   security, let them know about us.</li>

volunteer.html    23) </ol>
volunteer.html    24) 

en/volunteer.wml  25) <a id="Bugs"></a>
en/volunteer.wml  26) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Bugs">Critical bugs</a></h2>
en/volunteer.wml  27) <ol>
en/volunteer.wml  28) <li>Tor servers are not stable on Windows XP currently,
en/volunteer.wml  29) because we try to use hundreds of sockets, and the
en/volunteer.wml  30) Windows kernel doesn't seem capable of handling this. <a
en/volunteer.wml  31) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/WindowsBufferProblems">Please
en/volunteer.wml  32) help us solve this!</a> It is the number one problem with growing
en/volunteer.wml  33) the Tor network currently.</li>
en/volunteer.wml  34) </ol>
en/volunteer.wml  35) 

en/volunteer.wml  36) <a id="Installers"></a>
en/volunteer.wml  37) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Installers">Installers</a></h2>

volunteer.html    38) <ol>

en/volunteer.wml  39) <li>Matt Edman has written a <a
en/volunteer.wml  40) href="http://freehaven.net/~edmanm/torcp/download.html">NSIS-based
en/volunteer.wml  41) Windows installer bundle that
en/volunteer.wml  42) includes Privoxy and TorCP</a>. Can you help make it more stable and
en/volunteer.wml  43) featureful?
en/volunteer.wml  44) </li>

volunteer.html    45) <li>Develop a way to handle OS X uninstallation

en/volunteer.wml  46) that is more automated than telling people to
en/volunteer.wml  47) <a href="<cvssandbox>tor/doc/tor-doc-osx.html#uninstall">manually remove

en/volunteer.wml  48) each file</a>. It needs to have a way to click it into action.</li>

en/volunteer.wml  49) <li>Our <a href="<cvssandbox>tor/tor.spec.in">RPM spec file</a>

volunteer.html    50) needs a maintainer, so we can get back to the business of writing Tor. If
volunteer.html    51) you have RPM fu, please help out.</li>
volunteer.html    52) </ol>
volunteer.html    53) 

en/volunteer.wml  54) <a id="Usability"></a>
en/volunteer.wml  55) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Usability">Usability and Interface</a></h2>

volunteer.html    56) <ol>
volunteer.html    57) <li>We need a way to intercept DNS requests so they don't "leak" while
volunteer.html    58) we're trying to be anonymous. (This happens because the application does
volunteer.html    59) the DNS resolve before going to the SOCKS proxy.) One option is to use
volunteer.html    60) Tor's built-in support for doing DNS resolves; but you need to ask via
volunteer.html    61) our new socks extension for that, and no applications do this yet. A
volunteer.html    62) nicer option is to use Tor's controller interface: you intercept the
volunteer.html    63) DNS resolve, tell Tor about the resolve, and Tor replies with a dummy IP
volunteer.html    64) address. Then the application makes a connection through Tor to that dummy
volunteer.html    65) IP address, and Tor automatically maps it back to the original query.</li>
volunteer.html    66) <li>People running servers tell us they want to have one BandwidthRate
volunteer.html    67) during some part of the day, and a different BandwidthRate at other parts
volunteer.html    68) of the day. Rather than coding this inside Tor, we should have a little

en/volunteer.wml  69) script that speaks via the <a href="<page gui/index>">Tor Controller Interface</a>,

volunteer.html    70) and does a setconf to change the bandwidth rate. Perhaps it would run out
volunteer.html    71) of cron, or perhaps it would sleep until appropriate times and then do
volunteer.html    72) its tweak (that's probably more portable). Can somebody write one for us

en/volunteer.wml  73) and we'll put it into <a href="<cvssandbox>tor/contrib/">tor/contrib/</a>?</li>

volunteer.html    74) <li>We have a variety of ways to <a
volunteer.html    75) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ChooseEntryExit">exit
volunteer.html    76) the Tor network from a particular country</a>, but they all
volunteer.html    77) require specifying the nickname of a particular Tor server. It
volunteer.html    78) would be nice to be able to specify just a country, and
volunteer.html    79) have something automatically pick. This requires having some
volunteer.html    80) component that knows what country each Tor node is in. The <a

en/volunteer.wml  81) href="http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/exit.pl">script on

volunteer.html    82) serifos</a> manually parses whois entries for this. Maybe geolocation
volunteer.html    83) data will also work?</li>
volunteer.html    84) <li>Speaking of geolocation data, somebody should draw a map of the Earth
volunteer.html    85) with a pin-point for each Tor server. Bonus points if it updates as the
volunteer.html    86) network grows and changes.</li>
volunteer.html    87) <li>Tor provides anonymous connections, but we don't support
volunteer.html    88) keeping multiple pseudonyms in practice (say, in case you
volunteer.html    89) frequently go to two websites and if anybody knew about both of
volunteer.html    90) them they would conclude it's you). We should find a good approach
volunteer.html    91) and interface for handling pseudonymous profiles in Tor. See <a

volunteer.html    92) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Dec-2004/msg00086.html">this

volunteer.html    93) post</a> and <a
volunteer.html    94) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jan-2005/msg00007.html">followup</a>
volunteer.html    95) for details.</li>

volunteer.html    96) </ol>
volunteer.html    97) 

en/volunteer.wml  98) <a id="Documentation"></a>
en/volunteer.wml  99) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Documentation">Documentation</a></h2>

volunteer.html   100) <ol>

volunteer.html   101) <li>Please volunteer to help maintain this website: code, content,

volunteer.html   102) css, layout. Step one is to hang out on the IRC channel until we
volunteer.html   103) get to know you.</li>

volunteer.html   104) <li>We have too much documentation --- it's spread out too much and
volunteer.html   105) duplicates itself in places. Please send us patches, pointers, and
volunteer.html   106) confusions about the documentation so we can clean it up.</li>
volunteer.html   107) <li>Help translate the web page and documentation into other

en/volunteer.wml 108) languages. See the <a href="<page translation>">translation

volunteer.html   109) guidelines</a> if you want to help out. We also need people to help

en/volunteer.wml 110) maintain the existing Italian, French, and Swedish translations -
en/volunteer.wml 111) see the <a href="<page translation-status>">translation status
en/volunteer.wml 112) overview</a>.</li>

volunteer.html   113) <li>Investigate privoxy vs. freecap vs. sockscap for win32 clients. Are
volunteer.html   114) there usability or stability issues that we can track down and
volunteer.html   115) resolve, or at least inform people about?</li>

volunteer.html   116) <li>Can somebody help Matt Edman with the documentation and how-tos
volunteer.html   117) for his <a href="http://freehaven.net/~edmanm/torcp/">Windows Tor

volunteer.html   118) Controller</a>?</li>

volunteer.html   119) <li>Evaluate, create, and <a
volunteer.html   120) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorifyHOWTO">document
volunteer.html   121) a list of programs</a> that can be routed through Tor.</li>
volunteer.html   122) <li>We need better documentation for dynamically intercepting

en/volunteer.wml 123) connections and sending them through Tor. tsocks (Linux), dsocks (BSD),
en/volunteer.wml 124) and freecap (Windows) seem to be good candidates.</li>

en/volunteer.wml 125) <li>We have a huge list of <a href="<page support>">potentially useful

volunteer.html   126) programs that interface to Tor</a>. Which ones are useful in which
volunteer.html   127) situations? Please help us test them out and document your results.</li>
volunteer.html   128) </ol>
volunteer.html   129) 

en/volunteer.wml 130) <a id="Coding"></a>
en/volunteer.wml 131) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Coding">Coding and Design</a></h2>

volunteer.html   132) <ol>
volunteer.html   133) <li>We recommend Privoxy as a good scrubbing web proxy, but it's
volunteer.html   134) unmaintained and still has bugs, especially on Windows. While we're at
volunteer.html   135) it, what sensitive information is not kept safe by Privoxy? Are there
volunteer.html   136) other scrubbing web proxies that are more secure?</li>
volunteer.html   137) <li>tsocks appears to be unmaintained: we have submitted several patches
volunteer.html   138) with no response. Can somebody volunteer to start maintaining a new
volunteer.html   139) tsocks branch? We'll help.</li>

volunteer.html   140) <li>Right now the hidden service descriptors are being stored on just a few
volunteer.html   141) directory servers. This is bad for privacy and bad for robustness. To get
volunteer.html   142) more robustness, we're going to need to make hidden service descriptors
volunteer.html   143) even less private because we're going to have to mirror them onto many
volunteer.html   144) places. Ideally we'd like to separate the storage/lookup system from the
volunteer.html   145) Tor directory servers entirely. Any reliable distributed storage system
volunteer.html   146) will do, as long as it allows authenticated updates. As far as we know,
volunteer.html   147) no implemented DHT code supports authenticated updates. What's the right
volunteer.html   148) next step?</li>
volunteer.html   149) <li>Tor exit servers need to do many DNS resolves in parallel. But
volunteer.html   150) gethostbyname() is poorly designed --- it blocks until it has finished

volunteer.html   151) resolving a query --- so it requires its own thread or process. So Tor
volunteer.html   152) is forced to spawn many separate DNS "worker" threads. There are some
volunteer.html   153) asynchronous DNS libraries out there, but historically they are buggy and

volunteer.html   154) abandoned. Are any of them stable, fast, clean, and free software? (Remember,
volunteer.html   155) Tor uses OpenSSL, and OpenSSL is (probably) not compatible with the GPL, so
volunteer.html   156) any GPL libraries are out of the running.) If so

volunteer.html   157) (or if we can make that so), we should integrate them into Tor. See <a

volunteer.html   158) href="http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2005/msg00001.html">Agl's

volunteer.html   159) post</a> for one potential approach. Also see
volunteer.html   160) <a href="http://daniel.haxx.se/projects/c-ares/">c-ares</a> and
volunteer.html   161) <a href="http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libdnsres/">libdnsres</a>.
volunteer.html   162) </li>

volunteer.html   163) <li>Tor 0.1.1.x includes support for hardware crypto accelerators via
volunteer.html   164) OpenSSL. Nobody has ever tested it, though. Does somebody want to get
volunteer.html   165) a card and let us know how it goes?</li>

volunteer.html   166) <li>Because Tor servers need to store-and-forward each cell they handle,
volunteer.html   167) high-bandwidth Tor servers end up using dozens of megabytes of memory
volunteer.html   168) just for buffers. We need better heuristics for when to shrink/expand
volunteer.html   169) buffers. Maybe this should be modelled after the Linux kernel buffer
volunteer.html   170) design, where you have many smaller buffers that link to each other,
volunteer.html   171) rather than monolithic buffers?</li>

volunteer.html   172) <li>How do ulimits work on Win32, anyway? We're having problems,

volunteer.html   173) especially on older Windowses with people running out of file
volunteer.html   174) descriptors, connection buffer space, etc. (We should handle
volunteer.html   175) WSAENOBUFS as needed, look at the MaxConnections registry entry,
volunteer.html   176) look at the MaxUserPort entry, and look at the TcpTimedWaitDelay
volunteer.html   177) entry. We may also want to provide a way to set them as needed. See <a

volunteer.html   178) href="http://bugs.noreply.org/flyspray/index.php?do=details&id=98">bug

volunteer.html   179) 98</a>.)</li>

volunteer.html   180) <li>Patches to Tor's autoconf scripts. First, we'd like our configure.in
volunteer.html   181) to handle cross-compilation, e.g. so we can build Tor for obscure

volunteer.html   182) platforms like the Linksys WRTG54. Second, we'd like the with-ssl-dir
volunteer.html   183) option to disable the search for ssl's libraries.</li>

volunteer.html   184) <li>Implement reverse DNS requests inside Tor (already specified in

en/volunteer.wml 185) Section 5.4 of <a href="<cvssandbox>tor/doc/tor-spec.txt">tor-spec.txt</a>).</li>

volunteer.html   186) <li>Perform a security analysis of Tor with <a
volunteer.html   187) href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing">"fuzz"</a>. Determine

en/volunteer.wml 188) if there are good fuzzing libraries out there for what we want. Win fame by

volunteer.html   189) getting credit when we put out a new release because of you!</li>
volunteer.html   190) <li>How hard is it to patch bind or a DNS proxy to redirect requests to

volunteer.html   191) Tor via our <a href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#CompatibleApplications">tor-resolve socks extension</a>? What about to convert UDP DNS

volunteer.html   192) requests to TCP requests and send them through Tor?</li>

volunteer.html   193) <li>Tor uses TCP for transport and TLS for link
volunteer.html   194) encryption. This is nice and simple, but it means all cells
volunteer.html   195) on a link are delayed when a single packet gets dropped, and
volunteer.html   196) it means we can only reasonably support TCP streams. We have a <a
volunteer.html   197) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#TransportIPnotTCP">list
volunteer.html   198) of reasons why we haven't shifted to UDP transport</a>, but it would be

volunteer.html   199) great to see that list get shorter.</li>

volunteer.html   200) <li>We're not that far from having IPv6 support for destination addresses
volunteer.html   201) (at exit nodes). If you care strongly about IPv6, that's probably the
volunteer.html   202) first place to start.</li>

volunteer.html   203) </ol>
volunteer.html   204) 

en/volunteer.wml 205) <a id="Research"></a>
en/volunteer.wml 206) <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Research">Research</a></h2>

volunteer.html   207) <ol>

volunteer.html   208) <li>The "website fingerprinting attack": make a list of a few
volunteer.html   209) hundred popular websites, download their pages, and make a set of
volunteer.html   210) "signatures" for each site. Then observe a Tor client's traffic. As
volunteer.html   211) you watch him receive data, you quickly approach a guess about which
volunteer.html   212) (if any) of those sites he is visiting. First, how effective is
volunteer.html   213) this attack on the deployed Tor codebase? Then start exploring
volunteer.html   214) defenses: for example, we could change Tor's cell size from 512
volunteer.html   215) bytes to 1024 bytes, we could employ padding techniques like <a
volunteer.html   216) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#timing-fc2004">defensive dropping</a>,
volunteer.html   217) or we could add traffic delays. How much of an impact do these have,
volunteer.html   218) and how much usability impact (using some suitable metric) is there from
volunteer.html   219) a successful defense in each case?</li>

volunteer.html   220) <li>The "end-to-end traffic confirmation attack":
volunteer.html   221) by watching traffic at Alice and at Bob, we can <a
volunteer.html   222) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#danezis:pet2004">compare
volunteer.html   223) traffic signatures and become convinced that we're watching the same
volunteer.html   224) stream</a>. So far Tor accepts this as a fact of life and assumes this
volunteer.html   225) attack is trivial in all cases. First of all, is that actually true? How
volunteer.html   226) much traffic of what sort of distribution is needed before the adversary
volunteer.html   227) is confident he has won? Are there scenarios (e.g. not transmitting much)
volunteer.html   228) that slow down the attack? Do some traffic padding or traffic shaping
volunteer.html   229) schemes work better than others?</li>

volunteer.html   230) <li>The "routing zones attack": most of the literature thinks of
volunteer.html   231) the network path between Alice and her entry node (and between the
volunteer.html   232) exit node and Bob) as a single link on some graph. In practice,
volunteer.html   233) though, the path traverses many autonomous systems (ASes), and <a
volunteer.html   234) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004">it's not uncommon
volunteer.html   235) that the same AS appears on both the entry path and the exit path</a>.
volunteer.html   236) Unfortunately, to accurately predict whether a given Alice, entry,
volunteer.html   237) exit, Bob quad will be dangerous, we need to download an entire Internet
volunteer.html   238) routing zone and perform expensive operations on it. Are there practical
volunteer.html   239) approximations, such as avoiding IP addresses in the same /8 network?</li>

volunteer.html   240) <li>Tor doesn't work very well when servers have asymmetric bandwidth
volunteer.html   241) (e.g. cable or DSL). Because Tor has separate TCP connections between
volunteer.html   242) each hop, if the incoming bytes are arriving just fine and the outgoing
volunteer.html   243) bytes are all getting dropped on the floor, the TCP push-back mechanisms
volunteer.html   244) don't really transmit this information back to the incoming streams.
volunteer.html   245) Perhaps Tor should detect when it's dropping a lot of outgoing packets,
volunteer.html   246) and rate-limit incoming streams to regulate this itself? I can imagine
volunteer.html   247) a build-up and drop-off scheme where we pick a conservative rate-limit,
volunteer.html   248) slowly increase it until we get lost packets, back off, repeat. We
volunteer.html   249) need somebody who's good with networks to simulate this and help design
volunteer.html   250) solutions; and/or we need to understand the extent of the performance
volunteer.html   251) degradation, and use this as motivation to reconsider UDP transport.</li>
volunteer.html   252) <li>A related topic is congestion control. Is our
volunteer.html   253) current design sufficient once we have heavy use? Maybe
volunteer.html   254) we should experiment with variable-sized windows rather
volunteer.html   255) than fixed-size windows? That seemed to go well in an <a
volunteer.html   256) href="http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/theory.php">ssh
volunteer.html   257) throughput experiment</a>. We'll need to measure and tweak, and maybe
volunteer.html   258) overhaul if the results are good.</li>

volunteer.html   259) <li>To let dissidents in remote countries use Tor without being blocked
volunteer.html   260) at their country's firewall, we need a way to get tens of thousands of
volunteer.html   261) relays, not just a few hundred. We can imagine a Tor client GUI that
volunteer.html   262) has a "help China" button at the top that opens a port and relays a
volunteer.html   263) few KB/s of traffic into the Tor network. (A few KB/s shouldn't be too
volunteer.html   264) much hassle, and there are few abuse issues since they're not being exit
volunteer.html   265) nodes.) But how do we distribute a list of these volunteer clients to the
volunteer.html   266) good dissidents in an automated way that doesn't let the country-level
volunteer.html   267) firewalls intercept and enumerate them? Probably needs to work on a

en/volunteer.wml 268) human-trust level. See our <a
en/volunteer.wml 269) href="http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#China">FAQ
en/volunteer.wml 270) entry</a> on this, and then read the <a
en/volunteer.wml 271) href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Communications_20Censorship">censorship
en/volunteer.wml 272) resistance section of anonbib</a>.</li>

volunteer.html   273) <li>Tor circuits are built one hop at a time, so in theory we have the
volunteer.html   274) ability to make some streams exit from the second hop, some from the
volunteer.html   275) third, and so on. This seems nice because it breaks up the set of exiting
volunteer.html   276) streams that a given server can see. But if we want each stream to be safe,
volunteer.html   277) the "shortest" path should be at least 3 hops long by our current logic, so
volunteer.html   278) the rest will be even longer. We need to examine this performance / security
volunteer.html   279) tradeoff.</li>
volunteer.html   280) <li>It's not that hard to DoS Tor servers or dirservers. Are client
volunteer.html   281) puzzles the right answer? What other practical approaches are there? Bonus
volunteer.html   282) if they're backward-compatible with the current Tor protocol.</li>

volunteer.html   283) </ol>
volunteer.html   284) 
volunteer.html   285) Drop by the #tor IRC channel at irc.oftc.net or email tor-volunteer@freehaven.net if you want to help out!
volunteer.html   286) 

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