Summer 2017 Internship to Create a Bridge Bandwidth Scanner

This is a mentored internship position to produce a bridge bandwidth scanner for The Tor Project.

Design Constraints

1. Must be implemented in one of the following memory-safe languages:
   • Python;
   • Rust;
   • Another $LANGUAGE, but you'll have a lot of convincing to do.
2. Must run as a daemon;
3. Must produce a measured bandwidths file identical (or nearly identical) in syntax to the measured bandwidth files currently produced by relay bandwidth authorities (sample format).

1. During the course of the work, the intern should attend weekly tor dev meetings (on irc.oftc.net in #tor-dev on Mondays at 17:00 UTC), or otherwise send brief weekly status reports should be sent to tor-project@lists.torproject.org and the mentor(s).
2. The position is remote and may take place in any location of the intern's choice. (Optionally, you're welcome to arrange with your mentor(s) to work in person, but we cannot allocate funds towards travel expenses at this time.)
3. The length of the internship project is negotiable (between 1 and 3 months), and the (non-negotiable, sorry) compensation is $3000 USD.
4. Applications must be received by midnight UTC on Monday 26 June 2017.
5. It is not necessary to be (or have been) a student to apply.

Prerequisite Skills/Knowledge

• Reasonable ability to communicate w.r.t. technical matters in English, German, or French (in that order of preference);
• Python, Rust, or $LANGUAGE;
• Basic knowledge of how a circuit is constructed through the Tor Network;
• Basic knowledge of Tor bridges and anti-censorship infrastructure.

• Public code samples in the language of choice;
• Contributions of (integration) tests to an open source project (again, preferably in the language of choice);
• Asynchronous programming.

 

How To Apply

The mentor(s) for this project are:

• Isis Agora Lovecruft <isis@torproject.org>

• A brief description of yourself and/or a résumé;
• Links to, or attachments of, sample code you've authored;
  • If you are unable to provide code, please, in the $LANGUAGE you are choosing to do the project in, write a SOCKS5 (RFC 1928) proxy which (assuming there is no encryption, non-trivial encodings, or compression on the underlying protocol being transported, e.g. the underlying protocol is plaintext HTTP requests or something similar), upon receiving a connection from a client, rewrites the destination's response to change all gendered pronouns to those of some other gender. Your sample code should:
    1. Compile and/or run without errors;
    2. Demonstrate an ability to write networking code;
    3. Demonstrate the ability to do text manipulation in a safe and efficient manner;
    4. Show an understanding of how a basic proxy application functions;
    5. It is entirely permissible to use libraries to achieve the goal. For the blocking and asynchronous settings respectively, in Rust one might look at rust-socks or socks5-rs, and pysocks5 or txsocksx for Python.
• A brief proposal for how you would implement this project (it's okay to be vague and/or include questions, part of the internship will involve mentoring and continual feedback);