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Usability intro

About

This section summarizes the relevant proposals related to improve Onion Services usability by offering:

  1. Certification: to securely tie a TLS/HTTPS certificate (and optionally an organization) to a given onion service.
  2. Service discovery: address translation or alternative naming systems for censorship and forgery resistant name discovery/lookup.

Coexistence between implementations

This research analyzes many different proposals, which at first may not be compatible with each other. Here we try see whether implementations can coexist and what should be the minimum requirements for a proposal, in two levels:

  1. Technical specs: for proposing and implementing service discovery and certification methods. What a proposal should have in order to be valid?
  2. Governance specs: criteria and decision making procedures to accept or reject proposals.

These specs does not exist right now. Creating them is part of the plan.

Towards prioritization criteria

Having valid proposals is just part of the plan: prioritizing which ones should be considered first is the next step in roadmapping. Here we give some suggestions:

  1. Rule out experimental or disruptive technology.
  2. What can be implement by Tor developers?
  3. What depends in other people/groups/community?
  4. What depends on discussing/consensus due to different "world views" at Tor?
  5. What depends on little-Tor implementation (specially due to current prioritization on Arti)?
  6. What significantly increases the Tor Browser package size and then should be considered with care?
  7. What is most important?
  8. What could be included in sponsor work?
  9. What would only work for modified clients such as The Tor Browser, not working by default to all use-cases such as torify curl.
  10. Which (or part) of all proposals can be combined in a long-term (or incremental) solution?

Further references

Other relevant usability proposals

There are some proposals currently not evaluated in this research, but are listed here due to it's relevance or to be included in future:

Past discussions

This research is heavily inspired by previous documentation:

Other research