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four more items from jake
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## translation metadata # Revision: $Revision$ #include "head.wmi" TITLE="Tor: Volunteer" <div class="main-column"> <!-- PUT CONTENT AFTER THIS TAG --> <h2>Three things everyone can do now:</h2> <ol> <li>Please consider <a href="<page docs/tor-doc-relay>">running a relay</a> to help the Tor network grow.</li> <li>Tell your friends! Get them to run relays. Get them to run hidden services. Get them to tell their friends.</li> <li>We are looking for funding and sponsors. If you like Tor's goals, please <a href="<page donate>">take a moment to donate to support further Tor development</a>. Also, if you know any companies, NGOs, agencies, or other organizations that want communications security, let them know about us.</li> </ol> <a id="Usability"></a> <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Usability">Supporting Applications</a></h2> <ol> <li>We need good ways to intercept DNS requests so they don't "leak" their request to a local observer while we're trying to be anonymous. (This happens because the application does the DNS resolve before going to the SOCKS proxy.)</li> <li>Tsocks/dsocks items: <ul> <li>We need to <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TSocksPatches">apply all our tsocks patches</a> and maintain a new fork. We'll host it if you want.</li> <li>We should patch Dug Song's "dsocks" program to use Tor's <i>mapaddress</i> commands from the controller interface, so we don't waste a whole round-trip inside Tor doing the resolve before connecting.</li> <li>We need to make our <i>torify</i> script detect which of tsocks or dsocks is installed, and call them appropriately. This probably means unifying their interfaces, and might involve sharing code between them or discarding one entirely.</li> </ul> </li> <li>People running relays tell us they want to have one BandwidthRate during some part of the day, and a different BandwidthRate at other parts of the day. Rather than coding this inside Tor, we should have a little script that speaks via the <a href="<page gui/index>">Tor Controller Interface</a>, and does a setconf to change the bandwidth rate. There is one for Unix and Mac already (it uses bash and cron), but Windows users still need a solution. </li> <li>Tor can <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#ChooseEntryExit">exit the Tor network from a particular exit node</a>, but we should be able to specify just a country and have something automatically pick. The best bet is to fetch Blossom's directory also, and run a local Blossom client that fetches this directory securely (via Tor and checking its signature), intercepts <tt>.country.blossom</tt> hostnames, and does the right thing.</li> <li>Speaking of geolocation data, somebody should draw a map of the Earth with a pin-point for each Tor relay. Bonus points if it updates as the network grows and changes. Unfortunately, the easy ways to do this involve sending all the data to Google and having them draw the map for you. How much does this impact privacy, and do we have any other good options?</li> </ol> <a id="Documentation"></a> <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Documentation">Documentation</a></h2> <ol> <li>Please help Matt Edman with the documentation and how-tos for his Tor controller, <a href="http://vidalia-project.net/">Vidalia</a>.</li> <li>Evaluate and document <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/wiki/TheOnionRouter/TorifyHOWTO">our list of programs</a> that can be configured to use Tor.</li> <li>We need better documentation for dynamically intercepting connections and sending them through Tor. tsocks (Linux), dsocks (BSD), and freecap (Windows) seem to be good candidates, as would better use of our new TransPort feature.</li> <li>We have a huge list of <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/SupportPrograms">potentially useful programs that interface to Tor</a>. Which ones are useful in which situations? Please help us test them out and document your results.</li> <li>Help translate the web page and documentation into other languages. See the <a href="<page translation>">translation guidelines</a> if you want to help out. We especially need Arabic or Farsi translations, for the many Tor users in censored areas.</li> </ol> <a id="Coding"></a> <a id="Summer"></a> <a id="Projects"></a> <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Projects">Good Coding Projects</a></h2> <ol> <li> Tor/Polipo/Vidalia Auto-Update Framework <br /> Vidalia already has the ability to notice when the user is running an outdated or unrecommended version of Tor. Currently, Vidalia simply pops up a little message box that lets the user know they should manually upgrade. The goal of this project would be to extend Vidalia with the ability to also fetch and install the updated Tor software for the user. Time permitting, we would also like to be able to update other applications included in the bundled installers, such as Polipo and Vidalia itself. <br /> To complete this project, the student will first need to first investigate the existing auto-update frameworks (e.g., Sparkle on OS X) to evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, security properties, and ability to be integrated into Vidalia. If none are found to be suitable, the student will design their own auto-update framework, document the design, and then discuss the design with other developers to assess any security issues. The student will then implement their framework (or integrate an existing one) and test it. <br /> A student undertaking this project should have good C++ development experience. Previous experience with Qt is helpful, but not required. The student should also have a basic understanding of common security practices, such as package signature verification. Good writing ability is also important for this project, since a vital step of the project will be producing a design document for others to review and discuss with the student prior to implementation. </li> <li> An Improved and More Usable Network Map <br /> One of Vidalia's existing features is a network map that shows the user the approximate geographic location of relays in the Tor network and plots the paths the user's traffic takes as it is tunneled through the Tor network. The map is currently not very interactive and has rather poor graphics. Instead, we would like to leverage KDE's Marble widget that gives us a better quality map and enables improved interactivity, such as allowing the user to click on individual relays or circuits to display additional information. We might also consider adding the ability for users to click on a particular relay or a country containing one or more Tor exit relays and say, ``I want my connections to foo.com to exit from here.'' <br /> This project will first involve the student getting familiar with Vidalia and the Marble widget's API. The student will then integrate the widget into Vidalia and customize Marble to be better suited for our application, such as making circuits clickable, storing cached map data in Vidalia's own data directory, and customizing some of the widget's dialogs. <br /> A student undertaking this project should have good C++ development experience. Previous experience with Qt and CMake is helpful, but not required. </li> <li> Better Debian Support & Packaging <br /> Vidalia currently doesn't play nicely on Debian and Ubuntu with the default Tor packages. The current Tor packages automatically start Tor as a daemon running as the debian-tor user and (sensibly) do not have a CntrolPort defined in the default torrc. Consequently, Vidalia will try to start its own Tor process since it could not connect to the existing Tor, and then Vidalia's Tor process will then exit with an error message the user likely doesn't understand since Tor cannot bind its listening ports--they're already in use by the original Tor daemon. <br /> The current solution involves either telling the user to stop the existing Tor daemon and let Vidalia start its own Tor process, or explaining to the user how to set a control port and password in their torrc. A better solution on Debian would be to use Tor's ControlSocket, which allows Vidalia to talk to Tor via a Unix domain socket, and could possibly be enabled by default in Tor's Debian packages. Vidalia can then authenticate to Tor using cookie authentication if the user running Vidalia is also in the debian-tor group. <br /> This project will first involve adding support for Tor's ControlSocket to Vidalia. The student will then develop and test Debian and Ubuntu packages for Vidalia that conform to Debian's packaging standards and making sure it works well with the existing Tor packages. We can also set up an apt repository to host the new Vidalia packages. <br /> A student undertaking this project should have prior knowledge of Debian package management and some C++ development experience. Previous experience with Qt is helpful, but not required. </li> <li> Tor Status Event Interface <br /> There may are a number of status changes of which the user may need to be informed. For example, if the user is trying to set up a Tor relay and Tor decides the user's relay is not reachable from outside the user's network, we should alert the user. Currently, all the user gets is a couple log messages in Vidalia's 'message log', which they likely never see since they don't receive a notification that something has gone wrong. Even if the user does actually look at the message log, most of the messages make little sense to the novice user. <br /> Tor has the ability to inform Vidalia of many such status changes, and we recently implemented support for a couple of these events. Still, there are many more status events the user should be informed of and we need a better UI for actually displaying them to the user. <br /> The goal of this project then is to design and implement a UI for displaying Tor status events to the user. For example, we might put a little badge on Vidalia's tray icon that alerts the user to new status events they should look at. Double-clicking the icon could bring up a dialog that summarizes recent status events in simple terms and maybe suggests a remedy for any negative statuses if they can be corrected by the user. Of course, this is just an example and the student is free to suggest another approach. <br /> A student undertaking this project should have good UI design and layout experience and some C++ development experience. Previous experience with Qt and Qt's Designer will be very helpful, but not required. Some English writing ability will also be useful, since this project will likely involve writing small amounts of help documentation that should be understandable by non-technical users. Bonus points for some graphic design/Photoshop fu, since we might want/need some shiny new icons too. </li> <li> A translation wiki <br /> We require a way to edit and translate sections of the website — possibly resulting in a patch for the official svn tree. The current "cost" of publication of website changes is quite high even for English language users. They need to check out our template files, translate them and send us the translation. For a single word change or any type of minor change, the page may never be corrected or translated. It would be nice to have a wiki that was specifically geared towards translation and would somehow track the upstream (English) versions to indicate when a fresh translation is needed. This seems mostly like a job for a wiki integrator or wiki software author. Certainly the person would need to be interested in human languages and translation. They should at least be minimally familiar with what Tor is but would not have to interact with the software, only the documentation on the website. </li> <li> https://check.torproject.org <br /> We currently have a functional web page to detect if Tor is working. It is has a few places where it falls short. It requires improvements with regard to default languages and functionality. It currently only responds in English. In addition, it is a hack of a perl script that should have never seen the light of day. It should probably be rewritten in python with multi-lingual support in mind. It currently uses the Tor DNS exit list and should continue to do so in the future. It may result in certain false positives and these should be discovered, documented, and fixed where possible. Anyone working on this project should be interested in DNS, basic perl or preferably python programming skills and will have to interact minimally with Tor to test their code. </li> <li> exitlist.torproject.org <br /> The exitlist software is written by our fabulous anonymous contributer Tup. It's a haskel DNS server that supports part of our <a href="https://www.torproject.org/svn/trunk/doc/contrib/torel-design.txt">exitlist design document</a>. Currently, it's functional and it is used by check.torproject.org and other users. The issues that are outstanding are mostly aesthetic. This wonderful service could use a much better website using the common Tor theme. It would be best served with better documentation for common services that use an RBL. It could use more publicity. A person working on this project should be interested in DNS, basic RBL configuration for popular services, and writing documentation. The person would require minimal Tor interaction — testing their own documentation at the very least. Furthermore, it would be useful if they were interested in haskel and wanted to implement more of the torel-design.txt suggestions. </li> <li> Testing Tor for end users <br /> The Tor project currently lacks a solid test to ensure that a user has a properly configured web browser. It should test for as many known issues as possible. It should attempt to decloak the user in any way possible. Two current webpages that track these kinds of issues are run by Greg and HD Moore. Greg keeps a nice <a href="http://pseudo-flaw.net/tor/torbutton/">list of issues along with their proof of concept code, bug issues, etc</a>. HD Moore runs the <a href="http://metasploit.com/research/misc/decloak/">metasploit decloak website</a>. A person interested in attacking Tor could start by collecting as many workable and known methods for decloaking a Tor user. The person should be familiar with the common pitfalls but possibly have new methods in mind for implementing decloaking issues. The website should ensure that it tells a user what their problem is. It should help them to fix the problem or direct them to the proper support channels. The person should be closely familiar with using Tor and how to prevent Tor leakage. </li> <li> Tor needs even better censorship resistance mechanisms. There are several mechanisms that can help. Tor should be able listen on multiple addresses and ports, and allow clients to connect to all of them. Tor should be able to appear like a webserver (HTTP or HTTPS) when contacted by port-scanning tools. </li> <li> Tor should make better use of the more recent features of Niels Provos's Libevent library. Libevent already provides HTTP and socket buffers; Tor's code for those could be replaced. We'll need to improve libevent's code as needed; particularly, to add good openssl support on top of libevent's buffer abstraction. </li> <li> Tor should possibly measure bandwidth in a distributed way, as in the <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/">"A Tuneup for Tor"</a> paper by Snader and Borisov. A student could use current testing code to double-check this paper's findings and verify the extent to which they dovetail with Tor in the wild, and determine good ways to incorporate them into the Tor network without adding undesirable n^2 traffic properties at the directory authorities. </li> <li> Tor needs to be far more tested. This is a multi-part effort. To start with, our unit test coverage should rise substantially, especially in the areas outside the utility functions. This will require significant refactoring of some parts of Tor, in order to dissociate as much logic as possible from globals.<br /> Additionally, we need to automate our performance testing. We've got buildbot to automate our regular integration and compile testing already, but we need to get our network simulation tests (as built in torflow) updated for more recent versions of Tor, and designed to launch a test network either on a single machine, or across several, so we can test changes in performance on machines in different roles automatically. </li> <li> Reanimate one of the approaches to implement a Tor client in Java, e.g. the <a href="http://onioncoffee.sourceforge.net/">OnionCoffee project</a>, and make it run on <a href="http://code.google.com/android/">Android</a>. The first step would be to port the existing code and execute it in an Android environment. Next, the code should be updated to support the newer Tor protocol versions like the <a href="<svnsandbox>doc/spec/dir-spec.txt">v3 directory protocol</a>. Further, support for requesting or even providing Tor hidden services would be neat, but not required. The student should be able to understand and write new Java code, including a Java cryptography API. Being able to read C code would be helping, too. The student should be willing to read the existing documentation, implement code based on it, and, if required, refine the documentation if things are underdocumented. This project is mostly about coding and to a small degree about design. </li> <li> Write a tool that runs automatic system tests in addition to the existing unit tests. The Java-based Tor simulator <a href="https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/puppetor/trunk/">PuppeTor</a> might be a good start for starting up a private Tor network, using it for a while, and verifying that at least parts of it are working. This project requires to conceive a blueprint for performing system tests of private Tor networks, before starting to code. Typical types of tests range from performing single requests over the private network to manipulating exchanged messages and see if nodes handle corrupt messages appropriately. The student should be able to obtain a good understanding of how Tor works and what problems and bugs could arise to design good test cases. Understanding the existing Tor code and documentation is vital. If PuppeTor is used, the student should also be able to understand and possibly extend an existing Java application. This project is partly about design and partly about coding. </li> <li> Implement a <a href="http://www.ss64.com/bash/top.html">top-like</a> management tool for Tor relays. The purpose of such a tool would be to monitor a local Tor relay via its control port and include useful system information of the underlying machine. When running this tool, it would dynamically update its content like top does for Linux processes. <a href="http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Jan-2008/msg00005.html">This or-dev post</a> might be a good first read. The student should be familiar with or willing to learn about administering a Tor relay and configuring it via its control port. As an initial prototype is written in Python, some knowledge about writing Python code would be helpful, too. This project is for the one part about identifying requirements to such a tool and designing its interface; but on the other part, the project also requires a lot of coding. </li> <li>Help Mike Perry on his <a href="https://www.torproject.org/svn/torflow/">TorFlow</a> library (<a href="https://www.torproject.org/svn/torflow/TODO">TODO</a>): it's a python library that uses the <a href="https://www.torproject.org/svn/torctl/doc/howto.txt">Tor controller protocol</a> to instruct Tor to build circuits in a variety of ways, and then it measures performance and tries to detect anomalies.</li> <li>Torflow / soat to detect bad relays and automatically get that info to the directory authorities for realtime blacklisting</li> <li>Torstatus. Set up an automated system for tracking network health over time, graphing it, etc. Better metrics for assessing network health and growth.</li> <li>vidalia and upnp</li> <li>nymble</li> <li> Help port <a href="http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/polipo/">Polipo</a> to Windows. 1) handle spaces in path names and understand the filesystem namespace — namespace meaning where application data, personal data, and program data typically reside in various versions of Windows. 2) the ability to handle ipv6 communications. 3) the ability to asynchronously query name servers, find the system nameservers, and manage netbios and dns queries. 4) use native regex capabilities of Windows, rather than using 3rd party GNU regex libraries. 5) manage events and buffers natively (i.e. in Unix-like OSes, Polipo defaults to 25% of ram, in Windows it's whatever the config specifies). 6) some sort of GUI config and reporting tool, bonus if it has a systray icon with right clickable menu options. Double bonus if it's cross-platform compatible. </li> <li> a way to generate the website diagrams from source, so we can translate them as utf-8 text rather than with gimp. (svg? or imagemagick?) integrate this with a wml file so translations are easy and images are generated in multiple languages at web publish </li> <li>How can we make the <a href="http://anonymityanywhere.com/incognito/">Incognito LiveCD</a> easier to maintain, improve, and document?</li> <li>We need a distributed testing framework. We have unit tests, but it would be great to have a script that starts up a Tor network, uses it for a while, and verifies that at least parts of it are working.</li> <li>Don't like any of these? Look at the <a href="<svnsandbox>doc/design-paper/roadmap-future.pdf">Tor development roadmap</a> for more ideas.</li> <li>Don't see your idea here? We probably need it anyway! Contact us and find out.</li> </ol> <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Coding">Coding and Design</a></h2> <ol> <li>Tor relays don't work well on Windows XP. On Windows, Tor uses the standard <tt>select()</tt> system call, which uses space in the non-page pool. This means that a medium sized Tor relay will empty the non-page pool, <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/WindowsBufferProblems">causing havoc and system crashes</a>. We should probably be using overlapped IO instead. One solution would be to teach <a href="http://www.monkey.org/~provos/libevent/">libevent</a> how to use overlapped IO rather than select() on Windows, and then adapt Tor to the new libevent interface. Christian King made a <a href="https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/libevent-urz/trunk/">good start</a> on this last summer.</li> <li>We need to actually start building our <a href="<page documentation>#DesignDoc">blocking-resistance design</a>. This involves fleshing out the design, modifying many different pieces of Tor, adapting <a href="http://vidalia-project.net/">Vidalia</a> so it supports the new features, and planning for deployment.</li> <li>We need a flexible simulator framework for studying end-to-end traffic confirmation attacks. Many researchers have whipped up ad hoc simulators to support their intuition either that the attacks work really well or that some defense works great. Can we build a simulator that's clearly documented and open enough that everybody knows it's giving a reasonable answer? This will spur a lot of new research. See the entry <a href="#Research">below</a> on confirmation attacks for details on the research side of this task — who knows, when it's done maybe you can help write a paper or three also.</li> <li>Tor 0.1.1.x and later include support for hardware crypto accelerators via OpenSSL. Nobody has ever tested it, though. Does somebody want to get a card and let us know how it goes?</li> <li>Perform a security analysis of Tor with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing">"fuzz"</a>. Determine if there are good fuzzing libraries out there for what we want. Win fame by getting credit when we put out a new release because of you!</li> <li>Tor uses TCP for transport and TLS for link encryption. This is nice and simple, but it means all cells on a link are delayed when a single packet gets dropped, and it means we can only reasonably support TCP streams. We have a <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#TransportIPnotTCP">list of reasons why we haven't shifted to UDP transport</a>, but it would be great to see that list get shorter. We also have a proposed <a href="<svnsandbox>doc/spec/proposals/100-tor-spec-udp.txt">specification for Tor and UDP</a> — please let us know what's wrong with it.</li> <li>We're not that far from having IPv6 support for destination addresses (at exit nodes). If you care strongly about IPv6, that's probably the first place to start.</li> </ol> <a id="Research"></a> <h2><a class="anchor" href="#Research">Research</a></h2> <ol> <li>The "website fingerprinting attack": make a list of a few hundred popular websites, download their pages, and make a set of "signatures" for each site. Then observe a Tor client's traffic. As you watch him receive data, you quickly approach a guess about which (if any) of those sites he is visiting. First, how effective is this attack on the deployed Tor codebase? Then start exploring defenses: for example, we could change Tor's cell size from 512 bytes to 1024 bytes, we could employ padding techniques like <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#timing-fc2004">defensive dropping</a>, or we could add traffic delays. How much of an impact do these have, and how much usability impact (using some suitable metric) is there from a successful defense in each case?</li> <li>The "end-to-end traffic confirmation attack": by watching traffic at Alice and at Bob, we can <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#danezis:pet2004">compare traffic signatures and become convinced that we're watching the same stream</a>. So far Tor accepts this as a fact of life and assumes this attack is trivial in all cases. First of all, is that actually true? How much traffic of what sort of distribution is needed before the adversary is confident he has won? Are there scenarios (e.g. not transmitting much) that slow down the attack? Do some traffic padding or traffic shaping schemes work better than others?</li> <li>The "routing zones attack": most of the literature thinks of the network path between Alice and her entry node (and between the exit node and Bob) as a single link on some graph. In practice, though, the path traverses many autonomous systems (ASes), and <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#feamster:wpes2004">it's not uncommon that the same AS appears on both the entry path and the exit path</a>. Unfortunately, to accurately predict whether a given Alice, entry, exit, Bob quad will be dangerous, we need to download an entire Internet routing zone and perform expensive operations on it. Are there practical approximations, such as avoiding IP addresses in the same /8 network?</li> <li>Other research questions regarding geographic diversity consider the tradeoff between choosing an efficient circuit and choosing a random circuit. Look at Stephen Rollyson's <a href="http://swiki.cc.gatech.edu:8080/ugResearch/uploads/7/ImprovingTor.pdf">position paper</a> on how to discard particularly slow choices without hurting anonymity "too much". This line of reasoning needs more work and more thinking, but it looks very promising.</li> <li>Tor doesn't work very well when relays have asymmetric bandwidth (e.g. cable or DSL). Because Tor has separate TCP connections between each hop, if the incoming bytes are arriving just fine and the outgoing bytes are all getting dropped on the floor, the TCP push-back mechanisms don't really transmit this information back to the incoming streams. Perhaps Tor should detect when it's dropping a lot of outgoing packets, and rate-limit incoming streams to regulate this itself? I can imagine a build-up and drop-off scheme where we pick a conservative rate-limit, slowly increase it until we get lost packets, back off, repeat. We need somebody who's good with networks to simulate this and help design solutions; and/or we need to understand the extent of the performance degradation, and use this as motivation to reconsider UDP transport.</li> <li>A related topic is congestion control. Is our current design sufficient once we have heavy use? Maybe we should experiment with variable-sized windows rather than fixed-size windows? That seemed to go well in an <a href="http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/theory.php">ssh throughput experiment</a>. We'll need to measure and tweak, and maybe overhaul if the results are good.</li> <li>To let dissidents in remote countries use Tor without being blocked at their country's firewall, we need a way to get tens of thousands of relays, not just a few hundred. We can imagine a Tor client GUI that has a "Tor for Freedom" button at the top that opens a port and relays a few KB/s of traffic into the Tor network. (A few KB/s shouldn't be too much hassle, and there are few abuse issues since they're not being exit nodes.) But how do we distribute a list of these volunteer clients to the good dissidents in an automated way that doesn't let the country-level firewalls intercept and enumerate them? Probably needs to work on a human-trust level. See our <a href="<page documentation>#DesignDoc">early blocking-resistance design document</a> and our <a href="https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#BlockingResistance">FAQ entry</a> on this, and then read the <a href="http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Communications_20Censorship">censorship resistance section of anonbib</a>.</li> <li>Tor circuits are built one hop at a time, so in theory we have the ability to make some streams exit from the second hop, some from the third, and so on. This seems nice because it breaks up the set of exiting streams that a given relay can see. But if we want each stream to be safe, the "shortest" path should be at least 3 hops long by our current logic, so the rest will be even longer. We need to examine this performance / security tradeoff.</li> <li>It's not that hard to DoS Tor relays or directory authorities. Are client puzzles the right answer? What other practical approaches are there? Bonus if they're backward-compatible with the current Tor protocol.</li> </ol> <a href="<page contact>">Let us know</a> if you've made progress on any of these! </div><!-- #main --> #include <foot.wmi>