Multipath consensus integrity verification
We want to allow clients to use old consensuses safely without the directory authorities producing new ones. One of the problems with this is ensuring that directory mirrors don't game this time period to feed clients their favorite stale consensus that is still acceptable.
A related problem is "Can we do anything to mitigate malicious targeted consensus delivery in the event that a majority of dirauth signing keys are compromised?"
The common approach for this type of problem is multipath Perspectives-style key authentication. There are several ways we could authenticate the consensus documents in this model. For example, an append-only data structure such as a signed git repo could be created to store consensus hashes for all time. Tor clients could also be modified to store their own chain of observed consensus hashes in a file. In this way, potentially targeted users could drop their consensus hash history onto a USB key, mail it, relocate or otherwise bootstrap an alternate path to the git repo, and verify their connection was not compromised.
A more streamlined Tor-based solution is to extend current Tor directory protocols to allow the set of directory mirrors from legacy/trac#572 (moved) to be queried about the latest consensus time they have seen, and for the hash for that consensus time. Clients could then query k of these mirrors, determine the most recent consensus hash that all k mirrors agree on, and request that consensus document from the mirrors that have it. Such requests would be authenticated by the dir mirror identity keys, which would be stored in the Tor source code as part of legacy/trac#572 (moved).
This would require additional directory commands ("Tell me the timestamp on your most recent consensus" and "Tell me the hash of that consensus"), as well as some client logic.
The client logic is likely to be the complicated part. It's possible that the dirport commands could be added earlier, allowing us to experiment with various client approaches on the longer term.