Introducing Tor Project + Namecoin Intern Robert Nganga, Working on Proxy Leak Mitigation R&D

Hi Tor Community!

I’d like to introduce Robert Nganga, our new Outreachy intern. Robert is working on a ptrace-based tool for detecting and blocking proxy leaks. Manual auditing for proxy leaks is frequently a major time sink for developers in the Tor community, so having an automated tool for the job (which can be integrated into CI tests) will free up developer resources. Why ptrace? Existing tools in this space have major drawbacks. For example, torsocks uses LD_PRELOAD, which is incompatible with statically linked software such as most Go software. Transproxy-based approaches (such as used in Whonix) are incompatible with stream isolation. In contrast, ptrace works with pretty much any Linux software (including Go software), and doesn’t interfere with stream isolation.

This project is mentored by The Namecoin Project, under the Outreachy umbrella of The Tor Project.

Please give Robert a warm welcome to the Tor community! You’ll be able to follow his progress on the Namecoin Project news feed. If any developers in the Tor community have suggestions on functionality for this project that would be useful, please feel free to let us know, and we can add them as stretch goals.

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