Research

Research for Tor

Revamp research.torproject.org

Seeking to change Ideas page:

Link to blog posts on research questions
- Mike notes: there are 2-3 posts coming out soon
Linking to other things tagged research
And Chelsea’s post
Would like to have something a bit more permanent and regularly updated on this
- Issue — so many changes that it’s hard to keep it up
- Can we have high-level summaries on a page and links from there to detailed blog posts?
2 audiences:
- 1st-year grad students: overview would be helpful, more static
- Profs: want to know from Tor on what Tor team thinks about research: more dynamic

The high-level static ideas page

Have a set of ~3 papers about an idea to get started
Other info: Basics on Tor, like the torspec and other materials
- sounds useful
- It’s “Tor” not TOR!
Thinking to move anonbib into the research page
- Though maintaining anonbib is too much work
- Suggestion: instead of anonbib, include only very Tor-relevant papers in the Tor research papers page (Torbib)
- Automation: grab Tor stuff from CCS and other conferences?
- Have people submit things and vet them?
- What about fuzzy partially Tor papers? Doesn’t have to be perfect
Proposal: this would be a lektor site: Same as the support site and such
- Note: upcoming change is that this might be replaced with a github process, but point is the same
It would be great to have a list of research groups working on Tor stuff
- Current list is very incomplete
- Link to research groups
- Can this be tracked through the Torbib effort?
- Can professors teaching Tor-related research classes manage some of the work?
- Can Roger Dingledine post on the blog drawn from the NSF proposals that indicate the research impact of Tor

Dynamic thing:

Nikita goes on Tor IRC to read about what people think about research
It would be helpful to have summaries from Tor people on what they think about a paper
e.g. Why not implement this now? What is not known here? What they don’t like? Why does it not solve the problem?
This would be work, who would do it?
- Note: even keeping up anonbib is not viable
- Get grad students in each area to manage it? Give them credit on the page.
- JSOC-style. Pair grad student with Tor person to write a shared post
- Can keep these on the blog? Citable thing.
- Make them into an IEEE Magazine article? Oh, maybe not enough new for that?
How to assign grad students to this?
- The interested student can jump into it
- Find a couple of students to seed a couple of areas
- Need an editorial process with Tor.
- First the student IDs the papers and gets the thing started, then pair w/ Tor person

Mailing list

Hey, we should have a Tor researcher mailing list!
public archives? or not?
- suggested to treat things as a public list, since you don’t know who’s on there
Criteria: published a paper on Tor? sufficient but not necessary.
Criteria: have a Syverson number of at most 3
Nobody wants to moderate the list, so gatekeep the list
- No per-message moderation
Only established Tor researchers
- Would also allow Tor staff
- What about researchers new to Tor research? It’s a trade-off.
- Maybe can get invited, and 2nd layers?
- Will figure it out later, but definitely create the list

Chelsea’s Post