GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2013

Tor

Web Page: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Projects

Mailing List: https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

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 17 Gbps of traffic. The Tor Project has a staff of 28 developers, researchers, and advocates, plus several dozen volunteers who help out on a daily basis.

Projects

  • Create an Internet Censorship Virtual Machine Based Simulator I want to build a testbed for ooniprobe in a small, medium or even big network of potentially malicious nodes that censor and/or manipulate traffic. The main goal will be to build a fast, easy-to-use and extensible tool that can verify the functionality of ooniprobe tests against a toolbox of known internet censorhip techniques.
  • HTTPS Everywhere Mixed Content Detection and Handling The project I would like to work on is “HTTPS Everywhere mixed content detection and handling” which is listed on the Tor projects page. For this, I aim to help find a solution to Firefox 23’s blocking of “some insecure HTTP scripts and CSS in HTTPS pages”, which creates a mixed content situation.
  • Reduce RTT for preemptively built circuits Round-Trip-Times (RTT) of circuits can be measured by violating the exit policy of exit nodes by sending a "STREAM CONNECT" request to 127.0.0.1. Since the exit policy denies this connection, the request results in an error that can be timed in a measuring client. It is assumed that the RTTs are Fréchet-distributed and its tail can be approximated to be Pareto-distributed. This information can be used to reject a preemptively built circuit if its RTT is below a certain threshold value. It will be checked if the above assumption is valid and if performance of circuits can be increased with this approach with only a minor decrease in anonymity.
  • Run With Limited Capabilities Project I would like to subscribe to the "Run With Limited Capabilities" Project, which is mentored by nickm.
  • Searchable Tor descriptor archive I'd like to create a more integrated and powerful descriptor archival search and browse system. (The current tools are very restrictive and the experience disjointed.) To do this, I'll write an archival browsing application wherein the results are interactive: they may act as further search filters. Together with a search string input tool which will have more filtering options, the application will provide a more cohesive archival browse & search experience and will be a more efficient tool.
  • Steganography Browser Addon Browser addon for Firefox to detect steganographically and asymmetrically encrypted content embedded in website content such as images, videos , audios and etc. At the same time these addons are caplble of encrypt contents steganographically inside the website contents.