SPONSORED PROJECTS FOR 2020

Usability and Community Intervention on Support for Democracy and Human Rights (S9)

• Our training partners know how to document and communicate usability issues to us.
• TB incorporated many of the usability issues brought by our communities.
• Tor Project website and portals are improved.
• Community portal is launched.
• There is a established relationship with organizations on the ground working with marginalized individuals and historically oppressed groups.

Phase 4 tracking milestone.

Reliable Anonymous Communication Evading Censors and Repressors (S28)

• Obfuscated Channels Objective. To handle an adversary that observes and may control the entire network underlying RACE communications, we develop obfuscated channels in which communication is hidden within traffic generated by common applications. Working with external collaborators at Georgetown University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, this task develops a suite of obfuscated channels to support RACE goals for varying adversarial networks (i.e., deployment scenarios).
• Channel Integration and Analysis Objective. To develop tools for evaluating the performance and security of obfuscated channels at scale, both by themselves and when integrated with TA1 protocols. To apply those tools to RACECAR channels.

Tracking milestone.

Empowering Communities in the Global South to Bypass Censorship (S30)

• Support censorship circumvention through the improvement of network measurement methodologies aimed at detecting the blocking of circumvention tools
• Ensure users in target countries have access to the best Tor bridge options for circumventing censorship
• Improve Tor Browser and bridges.torproject.org experience for human rights defenders under censorship

Tracking activities.

Tor Browser Security, Performance, & Usability Improvements (S58)

• Build the infrastructure and processes to enable us to migrate Tor Browser for Android away from Fennec (on the Firefox Extended Support Release cycle) and onto Fenix (on the Firefox regular release cycle).
• Migrate Tor Browser for Android onto Fenix and away from Fennec.

Tracking milestone.

Making the Tor network faster & more reliable for users in Internet-repressive places (S61)

• Streamlining the tuning of the network;
• Deploying smarter methods for balancing traffic;
• Evaluating and implementing promising performance and scalability research;
• Proactively detecting, diagnosing, and resolving user-facing performance issues.

Tracking milestone.

Expanding Research Frontiers with a Next-Generation Anonymous Communication Experimentation (ACE) Framework (S38)

• The goal of this project is to develop a scalable and mature deterministic network simulator, capable of quickly and accurately simulating large networks such as Tor

Information about the project.

Onion Guides (S84) - FINISHED

• Our goal is to create three Onion Guides covering different onion service topics for people with different levels of knowledge about the Tor network and how onion services can help them.

Tracking milestone. Onion Guides.

Onion Services (S27) - FINISHED

• Enhance onion services and make v3 the default version on Core Tor, so it can scale and be more stable, with the goal of enabling more organizations to adopt it for their users.
• Improve the end user experience of onion services with the goal of increasing user adoption and retention.
• Research on the possible use of proof of work for defending against HS DoS attacks

Final report.

Improving the Tor network’s IPv6 support (S55) - FINISHED

• Increase the number of Tor network relays that support IPv6.

Tracking milestone.

OnionPerf: Scalability, Performance, Establishing Basline Metrics (S59) - FINISHED

• Make operational improvements to existing OnionPerf deployments and make it easier to deploy new OnionPerf instances
• Expand the kinds of measurements OnionPerf can take by making improvements to its codebase
• Make improvements to the way we analyze performance metrics.

Tracking milestone.

Walking Onions: Scaling & Saving Bandwidth on the Tor Network (S69) - FINISHED

• Implementation of the first phase of the ​Walking Onions proposal, a set of protocols improving scalability for the Tor network by enabling constant-size scaling of the information each user must download. Walking Onions will allow us to remove nearly all directory overhead from the Tor protocol, enabling Tor to scale to many more clients and relays, with no reduction in security.

Final report.