Hello Tor-devers,
It is a beautiful spring/summer day and this is vmon. I m going spend my summer with you guys. You might think that I m a bit off schedule with such a late GSoCc intro, but till 2 days ago I didn't know what I was going to do this summer for tor, so I couldn't write much before.
I've been using tor for a long time. I don't remember exactly when was the first time I encountered Tor but I think it was somehow through JonDo. Being behind censor, you always desperately google the word "proxy", and "Java Anonymous Proxy" came up in once. Reading more about it, lead me to Tor.
So I was a Tor user for a while, when I heard of gsoc. I talked to a friend of mine who had a gsoc experience before. He told me that Tor/EFF have some slots. It was a very interesting for us as we were both frustrated with our government behavior and we wanted to do something about it. We kept submitting our idea for a while (OK, twice) and kept getting rejected. So finally, I decided to deal with our concerns in a more "tor-friendly" way.
One of our concerns (which is getting more serious year after year) was that what if the government decides to close down any protocol that they don't like, and only let few common protocols, e.g. http, pass through. How useful would Tor be in such a situation? Around the same time, obfsproxy came out of no where, so I thought, one way to overcome this problem was to use obfsproxy to send tor over http.
After submitting my idea, I found out that at the end of the day, it wasn't *that* original. Zack/zwol had worked on it for a year. It is called Stegotorus. However, considering, the arm-race nature of the problem and the state of development of Stegotorus, tor people (specifically asn) suggested me to polish, improve and strengthen Stegotorus, instead of re-inventing the wheel. The final obstacle, that Stegotorus wasn't open, was resolved last week and I am very excited to deliver you a strong more robust Stegotorus by the end of the summer.
Zack is my primary mentor, followed by Steven (sjmurdoc1) and Roger (armadev) (according to Tor blog). I'll be sticking around #tor-dev (vmon) as much as possible and I'm happy to know, talk and learn from everyone of you.
See you on #tor-dev
Cheers, vmon
P.S. Dear GSoC Admin, I know I'm late on my first bi-weekly update but I thought my updates makes much more sense to people, If they are proceeded by an intro. I'll send my updates shortly.
On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 06:35:53AM -0600, vmon wrote:
After submitting my idea, I found out that at the end of the day, it wasn't *that* original. Zack/zwol had worked on it for a year. It is called Stegotorus. However, considering, the arm-race nature of the problem and the state of development of Stegotorus, tor people (specifically asn) suggested me to polish, improve and strengthen Stegotorus, instead of re-inventing the wheel. The final obstacle, that Stegotorus wasn't open, was resolved last week and I am very excited to deliver you a strong more robust Stegotorus by the end of the summer.
Is there any technical documentation or paper regarding Stegotorus available? I failed to find something on the Internet.
Apart from that, your project sounds quite interesting.
Philipp
On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 03:02:12PM +0200, Philipp Winter wrote:
Is there any technical documentation or paper regarding Stegotorus available? I failed to find something on the Internet.
There is a paper, but it's stuck in "under submission" limbo. I think the paper is going to want some revisions before it settles down.
We're working on getting the source tree up, and then I'll try to encourage them to make a tech report version.
--Roger
On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 6:29 AM, Roger Dingledine arma@mit.edu wrote:
On Mon, Jun 04, 2012 at 03:02:12PM +0200, Philipp Winter wrote:
Is there any technical documentation or paper regarding Stegotorus available? I failed to find something on the Internet.
There is a paper, but it's stuck in "under submission" limbo. I think the paper is going to want some revisions before it settles down.
We're working on getting the source tree up, and then I'll try to encourage them to make a tech report version.
For the moment, the source tree is visible on Github: https://github.com/zackw/stegotorus. It is likely to move to gitweb.torproject.org hosting in the near future.
I am happy to send drafts of the paper to anyone who is curious, but I can't just send it to the list, because until it's accepted for publication somewhere, we don't want the PDF where it'll get indexed by search engines. I am also working on opening up the version control for the TeX sources -- that's a technical problem rather than a bureaucratic one: someone (read "me") has gotta convert it out of SVN.
On a related note, any cryptographers reading this message are invited to review the code at https://github.com/zackw/moeller-ref -- this is not currently used by StegoTorus but will be in the very near future, and it's the first-ever implementation of a specialized asymmetric cryptosystem, so it needs more eyes.
zw
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Philipp Winter -
Roger Dingledine -
vmon -
Zack Weinberg