The Tor Project/Electronic Frontier Foundation

Web Page: https://www.torproject.org/gsoc.html.en#Ideas

Mailing List: https://www.torproject.org/documentation.html.en#MailingLists

The Tor Project is a free-software non-profit project to build an anonymity toolkit used by individuals, companies, governments, and law enforcement around the world. The Tor network has grown since its start in 2002 to several hundred thousand active users pushing over 1Gbps of traffic. The Tor project has a staff of 17 developers, researchers, and advocates, plus several dozen volunteers who help out on a daily basis.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), founded in 1990, works in the public interest to protect fundamental civil liberties in the digital age. The Internet and other communication technologies can herald the most liberating era of human history---or the most regulated and controlled. The EFF works to defend our basic rights to free speech, privacy and free and open communications, and advocates for sane policies on digital copyright, software patents and electronic voting. EFF is a membership supported organization with 29 full-time staff.

This proposal is a combined submission from EFF and Tor.

Projects

• Extending Tor Network Metrics I intend to extend the Tor metrics portal (specifically Ernie) to store long-term network statistics, as well as simplify the process of searching large data sets from the relay descriptors.
• Extensions to Switzerland project UI, tests, internals Extend the Switzerland GUI written during GSoC 2009. Add more detail to the GUI, hooks to manage and monitor the server, and an API to run automated tests.
• Google Summer of Tor: JTor's Hidden Services JTor is a Java library implementation of the Tor protocol. Its goal is to provide a lightweight framework for embedding the Tor protocol into applications, part of which includes the capability of hosting and connecting to Tor Hidden Services. For Google Summer of Code 2010, I propose to implement the access and publishing components of Tor Hidden Services in Java as part of JTor.
• Improving Snakes on a Tor The Snakes on a Tor (SoaT) exit scanner has the potential to dramatically improve the safety of Tor users by ferreting out misconfigured and malicious exit nodes. At present it suffers from certain stability issues which prevent it from being run for long periods of time, and from an overabundance of false positives in the results it generates. I will work on improving the stability of SoaT and reducing the number of false positives which it reports.
• Tor DNSEL Rewrite The TorDNSEL project is concerned with identifying individual hosts as valid and accessible Tor exit relays. Each Tor exit relay has an associated exit policy governing what traffic may leave the Tor circuit and go out as requests to the internet. A public database that can be easily queried or scraped would be of huge benefit to the Tor community and to services that are interested in whether clients originate from the Tor network, such as Wikipedia and IRC networks.